Hey, friends. So for today’s adlib, I’m gonna try and do 2 separate videos back to back or maybe I’ll just do one. And what I’m thinking is that I’ll do my first video about thinking and the second video about feeling so that by having them kind of separate and yet both on my mind at the same time, I hope to I hope it’ll be interesting to me. There’s there’s my own personal reasons for why I feel like splitting it up in that way. And it’s the interesting thing about information architecture in general, which is also an interesting thing about project management.

Everything is related, which is that, you know, I I know that I have effectively an infinite set of things to talk about, but the reason that, you know, the challenge when you have an infinite set of things to talk about is to decide what you wanna talk about first and how you wanna talk about it and how you’re gonna frame that and how you’re gonna present it. And, you know, I was looking at the past 10 or so videos that I’ve made, and I’ve been trying to think about, okay, what what’s something that I could do that is the biggest possible departure from all of the other things that I’ve done so far, You know, I don’t wanna be this kind of boring incrementalist who’s just following up on what I just said earlier and kind of making these tiny follow ups. I mean, ultimately in the long run, I want to elaborate on all the things that I’ve said, but you know, while I’m kind of starting out and building out a body of work, I want to I want to have my dots all over the territory as far apart as possible. Like, you know, I wanna I wanna cover as much ground as I can and, you know, so when I was gonna write this when I was gonna make this video, I had a list of things that I wanted to talk about.

One of it was maybe school, one of it was maybe strategy. I was thinking of talking about strategy, and then I realized that I actually have a view I have a video about my YouTube strategy, which isn’t the same thing, but it feels kind of, you know, it it overlaps a bit more than I’d like, and so I want to separate the overlap more. And it I I was I went to a Slack chat, the interintellect Slack chat to have conversations with people to try and figure out what I should be talking about and, you know, a couple of guys offered to help me out– and before they even said anything, I’m like, oh, I think I’m overthinking this. Maybe I should do a video about overthinking and then maybe I should just do a video about thinking. Right?

So here is my video about thinking that took me 2 and a half minutes to get to. So I have always been, I have always been a thinker and, you know, that that phrase is a pretty loaded phrase, I think, and, I think it’s loaded in the in the sense of, MBTI, the Myers Briggs typography, that framework where, you know, you have 16 different types, and 8 of the types are, you know, like, so I’m an ENTP and and the T stands for thinking or thinker and then F stands for feeling. And and the in in the context of the MBTI framework, the T or the F doesn’t necessarily mean that, oh, you’re a person who only thinks or you’re a person who only feels. It just it typically means that your dominant function or the thing that you’re best at is related to thinking or feeling in inwards or outwards. So it’s it’s a lot more complex than people think it is.

And, even so, you know, I don’t believe in the separation between thinking and feeling. I think so, I think of thinking as as an instrument. It’s it’s a it’s like, you know, it’s the intellectual psychological equivalent of like weighing scales and barometers and and rulers. It’s it’s a way of processing information. But most information is actually, like, I mean, emotional information, you know.

Like, when you’re thinking about what decision you wanna make, you’re basically weighing the pros and cons of something, usually. And, you know, what makes a pro a pro and what makes a con a con? If you really dig into it all the way down, it boils down to your feelings about those respective things. And, you know, you might say things that, oh, this is objective because I wanna take that job instead of this job because it pays more. But embedded in that is the fact that you feel that that getting more money is a good thing and you’re you’re choosing to weight(?).

Right? More money higher than whatever else the other variables are. And, you know, so thinking is is the weighing scale, whereas feelings are the weights that are on the weighing scale. Right? And so you need both because it doesn’t matter if you have if you have a fantastic set of instruments, but your your your feelings are all kind of vague and kludgy, then no matter how well you think, like, you’re still gonna end up kind of screwed.

And and, you know, you can go into more detail about that, which I don’t really feel like doing right now. But okay. So I I wanna just I just wanna talk about thinking because I feel that we have a thinking deficit in the world. Right? And And I also think we have a feeling deficit in the world, but that’s I’m gonna save that for the next video.

So it’s not that I feel like people should feel less and think more. I think people should think more and feel more and I’m gonna focus on thinking for this video and, you know, it’s funny because sometimes I see phrases like, design thinking, systems thinking, critical thinking. There’s all these adjectives that people put in front of thinking to make it kind of, I don’t know, sexier or relevant or or whatever. But to me, it’s all just thinking. Thinking is just to me, it’s asking questions.

It’s processing information. It’s thinking, you know. It’s about figuring out what you wanna do, figuring out what should be done, figuring out what things are, making sense of reality, and then determining how you should act on that information. Now the actual acting is, you know, you can think you you can’t… one of my phrases that I mentioned somewhere else, which I might make a separate video about, is that you can’t think your way out of a courage deficit. Meaning, if you’re fundamentally afraid of something, you can spend a lot of time thinking around the problem, but ultimately confronting the fear is something that, you know, you you can you can break the fear down into more manageable things to confront.

But ultimately, the act of confronting a fear is an act. It’s something that you do. It’s something that, you know, you do with your body effectively. Even if it’s, you know, I’m gonna text my boss, right, and ask for a raise. Like, that’s still an act.

It’s something you choose to do. It’s something you have an emotional response to. You feel nervous or you feel scared or, you know, you feel angry. Whatever it is, it is about your feelings and and you think to process your feelings but my cat is here. You think to process your feelings but ultimately you act.

You know, So so I what like, you know, there are quotes like the unexamined life is not worth living and then people flip it and say the unlived life is not worth examining. I think both statements are kinda true and, you know, like, so what is examining and what is living? You know, like, to there there is this idea that this stereotype of of I think what some people call the straw Vulcan. My friend, Julia, said that, like a straw Vulcan is this this caricature of of a hyper rational person who has no feelings basically or who, you know, is kind of cold and analytical and everything is about utility and everything is about, you know, what’s for the greatest good. And there’s there’s no, you know, make sure that we make the right decisions and to make sure that we, you know, do justice to our circumstances, to do justice to be to be fair and equitable to other people and to ourselves.

Right? And, you know, I I guess there is a sense that sometimes the immediacy of a feeling can be overblown probably because, again, we live in civilization and, our feelings are not super well not always super well calibrated for our modern circumstances. So, you know, you might feel a sense of rage at something or a sense of shame or whatever and that that feeling might be overblown. It it might be, you know, it might be a a kind of defense mechanism or some kind of response that is disproportionate and then you need to step away if you can and and think about it to process the feeling. So you don’t deny that the feeling happened, but you try to contextualize it and you make sense of it.

I saw a tweet earlier. There was something like, you know, feelings are derived from your beliefs. So, you know, and and you can think about your beliefs and change your beliefs potentially or experiment with beliefs true, to what degrees is what I’m doing useful. Okay. That’s kind of general sketching, right?

I wanna be useful. So what what how do I think about thinking? I think there is there’s, like, there’s this more abstract kind of big picture, philosophical grand thinking, which is interesting and fun, and there is there’s instrumental thinking, which is very, very functional, very, very, it’s about doing something it’s about getting stuff done basically. Right? And, I grew up not very good at instrumental thinking or at, you know, I think in MBTI, we would call it, extroverted thinking, which is like implementation intelligence or, you know, executive intelligence, like the ability to do things, the ability to make decisions, the ability to decide that, oh, this is better than that.

So we’re going to do what’s better, that kind of thing. Or, you know, even like, tactical thinking. Right? Like, we should do this before we do that because it’s smarter to do this before that, you know. Things like how you’re gonna plan your day, you know.

I got 3 errands to run and I got, alright, all that kind of thing. I I used to not be good at those things and, I mean, I would be good at it in, like, I’ll be decent at it in a video game kind of context where, you know, like, trying to optimize a path in a video game. It’s fun. Right? It’s it’s a it’s a like a brain puzzle, brain teaser.

But in reality, you know, within the context of your life, it gets complicated. It gets complicated. It gets complicated. It gets you know, within the context of your life, it gets complicated because there are emotions attached to it, right, to the things that you do and and your priorities and and you have feelings about each of the things that you’re doing and you may not know what those feelings are and you may not address them. So, you know, even in a video about thinking, I’m gonna be talking a lot about feelings.

And okay. So this is kind of instrumental thinking and on the other end, we have, how do you describe it? Like, kind of just open ended big picture abstract thinking. I guess, how do how do I think about that? I think of it almost as, like, like, tending to my mind garden, and the mind garden is is massive and and sprawling and and, you know, things about, like, you know, what is the meaning of life.

Right? To me, it’s friends, by the way. And, you know, what what how should I spend my time? How should I those are kind of bigger questions. And, you know, I’m half I’m like 10 minutes, 12 minutes into this video and I’m wondering if if I made a bit of a mistake because I’m not too sure if I have a very concrete sense of where I’m gonna go with this, but I’d you know, as I say this, I do feel like I have some I have some confidence that in the next 20 minutes, I’m gonna say something interesting.

So we’ll see. I I’m I’m coming along with you guys on this adventure because I I didn’t I’m adlibbing. I didn’t set out in advance to decide what the video is gonna be about. But, you know, so what was he thinking? Right?

What is the point of doing an ad lib video where you don’t know in advance whether or not it’s gonna be good? Are you gonna be wasting your time? I don’t think so. So from my past experience, I believe that, you know, so I’m I’m doing this to train my muscle in a way, my my improvisational muscle, my speaking off the top, off the cuff muscle. I wanna get better at this.

I remember watching I think– so Louis CK once made a tribute video to George Carlin (note: technically he was giving a eulogy and someone else recorded and uploaded the video) and he talked about how, you know, he used to do so Louis CK himself spent a lot of time preparing his set and his jokes. Like like he he came up all this material. He had, like, a couple of like an hours worth of material, 2 hours worth of material. And he looked up to George Carlin who had a who seemed to have, like, infinite material. And so he went and asked Carlin, hey, how do you have so much material?

And Carlin said, oh, you know, when I’m done recording a special, I just discard it. I’m never gonna use it again. I just come up with new stuff. And to Louis at the time, he was like, how is that possible? How can anybody, you know, make that much material?

Like, I it took me, like, so long to come up with this one shitty hour of material and here’s this guy producing special after special after special and it seems like he just, you know, never is has like infinite good material and I I believe that’s because there is some limiting belief that people have about So you shouldn’t get too precious about your existing material. There’s an element of faith involved. You have to have faith that if I get rid of all of this material, I made that material because I am good at what I do. I have taste, I can figure out good stuff. That was my cat going into my cupboard.

She knows how to get out. Anyway, what was I gonna say? Yeah. So apart, you know, like you can challenge yourself You have to challenge yourself to come up with more material before you can really come up with more material. If you’re kind of clinging on to the material that you already have, you’re not gonna break new ground.

It’s like a it’s like a security blanket or it’s a comfort zone or it’s, you know, you have to you have to lose sight of the shore to to go to new new seas, right, new lands and this is So I I have observed this. So I’m not I’m not taking it on like blind faith. I’ve observed multiple people doing this. I’ve witnessed myself achieving some version of this in my writing, for example, and so I believe that if I do this, I will achieve this as well. So I’m choosing to adlib and talk about things that I have not planned because I want to see for myself how I respond to the fact that I don’t know what I’m gonna say.

Right? And, you know, can we tie that back to thinking? What was he thinking? What was I thinking? I was thinking that I would I would find something interesting as I go.

And, you know, so it’s it’s it’s a pro it’s like a problem solving challenge in a way because there is there is a lot of material in my head, meaning all the books I’ve read, all the things I’ve watched, all the all the random observations and things on my mind, and, you know, putting myself on the spot, hitting record, letting the numbers start to go up, it it puts it puts some urgency on me, like, okay, like, you know, people have been watching several of my videos so far and, you know, I I hopefully, I have built some trust and people now kind of look forward to my next video thinking that, oh, those past few videos are pretty good. The next one will probably be good as well. And, you know, so there’s there’s, like, stakes. Like, I don’t wanna disappoint people, but I don’t want my fear of disappointing people to turn me into some kind of, boring store like just I don’t wanna become formulaic. I don’t wanna become predictable.

And so to surprise other people, I need to surprise myself. And to surprise myself, I need throw myself off the deep end from time to time. And, yeah, you know, it’s not always gonna be great like that. There is some inevitable failure when it comes to to risk. But, you know, 15 minutes in, I I’m pretty sure we’re gonna find an interesting way to wrap this up.

I still don’t know what it’s gonna be yet, but I I I’m fairly confident. Okay. So what have I talked about so far? I I am known to be pretty decent at thinking. I I think about instrumental thinking, which is about how you get stuff done, how you think about things around you, how you you process information.

And then there’s this more abstract kind of thinking. I just drank water weirdly. There’s this more abstract kind of thinking that’s, not so instrumental. It’s kind of It’s almost like, you know, there’s like there’s like applied physics and pure physics or theoretical physics. So, yeah, there’s like like this applied thinking and there’s like this kind of abstract, you know, thinking for its own sake thinking which can, you know, which can be very seductive.

It can be very interesting. You can you and it can be it can be a trap. It can be something that you spend a lot of your time in and, you know, a lot of Internet culture, I think, think, the or the Internet in general appeals to people who want to do that and, you know, peep it it becomes So a lot of Twitter is like this. A lot of Reddit is like this. Like, people who just like thinking for its own sake which can be fun.

It can sometimes be really useful, but it can also be a distraction from everything else that’s going on in your life. And, I was definitely guilty of that for a lot of my life. Like, when I was a teenager and when I was, in national service and in my, you know, in my early twenties, I think I went through a very painful psychologically painful period in my early twenties because I was coming to discover that that sort of abstract analytical thinking is not, you know, it’s it’s fun to be good at it but it doesn’t impact your material reality very much. And by material reality, I mean, it doesn’t help you pay the bills. Right?

It doesn’t help you it doesn’t help you, console a friend. I mean, okay, there are there are applications but you, you know, you can console a friend with abstract ideas if you know how to relate those abstract ideas to your friend’s circumstances. And, you know, so you need both parts of the equation. You have to draw, you have to you have to you have to construct a bridge from your kind of abstract, thinking which is very, you know, blue ocean, big, open, expansive, infinite space, right? And then there’s this very messy practical reality down here and it’s tempting to go off into the go off into the clouds and, I mean, so you’ll meet different kinds of people.

Right? And there’ll be people who are very proud of their executive functioning and, you know, are very good at at at making money or very good at just that kind of thing and they judge the people who are very abstract as, oh, those pie in the sky, head in the clouds motherfuckers who, you know, like doing their abstract philosophy or their their, you know, like debating ethics and then values and and all those things. Are they they’re just wasting time? They just, you know, nobody pays them for that stuff and, I mean, you can make a living doing that kind of thing but again, to do that, you then have to have to monetize it. You have to have an audience.

You have to have a body of work. There’s there’s all this Again, you know, you have to you have to take the the fire of the gods, the Promethean fire and you have to bring it down to Earth. That’s the that’s the challenge. Right? Or you will lose lose yourself in the clouds and kind of drift off from reality, which some people, you know, it’s it’s a life.

It’s a lifestyle. It’s a choice. If that’s what you choose, then that’s what you choose. But my experience has been that when I did that and I lived like that, I was not happy. I was I felt disconnected from the world.

I felt disconnected from myself. I felt disembodied. I felt like, just, you know, I I wasn’t I wasn’t happy. Right? And I wasn’t and I don’t I don’t just mean happy in terms of like experiencing pleasure because there there is a pleasure in in in, you know, reading insights.

Right? And so on Twitter, sometimes you see things about, like, we we there’s there’s this community, and then we joke about, insight porn. Right? And what what is insight porn? Insight porn is when you when you read something or you say something or you tweet something that sounds correct and it it you know, you read it and you’re like, oh, wow.

This makes sense. You’re nodding your head a lot like shit that explains so much. That explains, you know, like you read some insight about social dynamics and then you’re like, oh, yeah. That explains why my my brother and my dad don’t get along or that explains, you know, it explains stuff and you hear the explanation and, oh, shit, things make sense to you now. And I think a lot of YouTube is probably like this as well.

Right? Like a lot of, there’s this nerdy philosophical content that that tries to explain things to you and you can watch it, you know, in bed or in the shower or whatever and and you feel like you’re learning something because things are making sense but which is again, which is great. I love that shit but the challenge is always to then make your thinking about those things. Figure out how those things apply to your life. And, you know, it may not directly and maybe it never will.

And that’s also okay because I don’t want to, you know, I I’m not– I wouldn’t say that I’m a utilitarian. Meaning, I wouldn’t say that I’m a person who obsesses about trying to make sure that every single thing you do is useful because I think that’s joyless and I think I think it’s it’s very short sighted because you don’t know in advance what’s gonna be useful and something that starts out very frivolous and very silly, abstract, blah blah blah can end up being dramatically useful in some ways that you can’t anticipate. So, you know, I I wouldn’t my I wouldn’t say that it it really depends on the person that you’re talking to and the circumstances that that you’re in. You know, if you see a person and they they love to, they’re like an absent minded professor and they love to just spend their life, geeking out about some obscure philosophy or some obscure theory of of something. That’s their choice, you know, if if that’s what they wanna do with their life and if they’re not hurting anybody and they’re not, you know, if they’re getting if they can make a a decent enough living such that they don’t impose on anybody else, then that’s fine, you know, and even, you know, so it’s it’s I’m not here to shame anybody else.

I just I so the the the point of this is I have made progress in my thinking over the years and I think that is the thing that this video should really be about and that is the thing that I want to share with my friends, you guys. Right? Which is how has my thinking evolved and what have I learned and, you know, yeah, let’s let’s focus on that. Right? So we’ve it took us 25 minutes to get to an interesting question.

And, we will spend the next 10 minutes answering it. Right? So how has my thinking evolved? When I was a child, I just like to read books and play video games and, I didn’t feel obliged to to think much beyond that. I like to contemplate things.

I like to consider things. I like to learn about the world and learn about, facts. Right? Learn about space, learn about time, learn about dinosaurs and civilizations. But I think it wasn’t until I was maybe a teenager about, I think about maybe 14 through 16 that I started you know, like so I I got I had puberty, right?

And I started to be interested in girls and but not just girls, right? I was interest I started to think about about my social status, I guess. I started to think about my role in social life amongst my friends. I started to care about what other people thought of me. And and and that I think became something that kind of permanently becomes a part of your thinking.

Like, when you’re a child, you just want to have fun. You just want to play and and and enjoy yourself, which is great. And, you know, like, it’s good to be childlike sometimes and forget else. Let’s just have fun. Right?

That’s it’s a healthy practice to practice from time to time. But I think that to be a a a full human And I mean, I I I realized the moment I say that that that phrase can be kind of, iffy. It can imply that some people are less human than others. That’s just not what I mean. I mean, kind of to really to really immerse yourself in the human experience, to be really connected to social reality.

And again, when I say these things, these are things that I care about. You may not necessarily care about these things and it’s your choice to decide whether or not you care about these things. But I have found that the more connected I am to existence, to myself, to other people, to different kinds of people, to history, to philosophy, to to, you know, even international relations. Right? Like, the more I feel connected to all of these things, the more I feel like I can live a good life.

And I think I think, that is that is a question that I care about a lot that maybe isn’t so I mean, so I’m pretty late to this whole YouTube talking head thing and, you know, I feel like if a decade ago I had said something like, you know, it it seems to be less fashionable these days to ask what a good life is. I think that would have been a, like, a, woah. Like, that’s such a novel thought. But I think a bunch of people have been asking this recently. And I’m sure they’ve always been, you know, they’ve always been the nerds and the readers and the people who read novels, write novels, and and and have book clubs and ask questions of what is the meaning of life?

You know, what what is life about? I I think there comes this point where once you start having bills to pay, you have a mortgage, you have, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that your material life is all that matters. And so here’s here’s here’s the pain that I went through. Right? So I used to when I was 20, I was very concerned with very grand ideas.

I was very concerned with, you know, what’s what’s the best for the species, right? What what is, how do we elevate the consciousness of the species? How do we, you know, create more good art? How do we just how do we how do we live, right? How do we how do we live with joy and meaning and purpose?

And then, you know, I got married, I got a house, and then now I’m like, how the fuck do I pay my bills? Right? And when that happened and and it it it hurt me. It was like a punch to my gut to realize that all of that thinking that I did about, grand things, it didn’t immediately help me with my work and I found myself falling behind at work, like I wasn’t getting things done. I was, you know, late to meetings sometimes.

I was I was missing deadlines, and I’m like, what the fuck? And, you know, my boss would have conversations with me. He was great. He was really like a mentor and a and a like, he really helped me with a lot of stuff. And he helped me he asked me he would he he he asked me great questions.

He’s like, what are your priorities in life? What do you want? What do you wanna accomplish? Who do you wanna be? And, you know, I would have this vague ideas like, oh, I want to I want to help, you know, around 2013, I was like, I want to help, commercialize space travel, right, because of the overview effect.

If you don’t know what the overview overview effect is, the overview effect is experience that astronauts have when they go to space and they look at the Earth from space and they experience this this sense of profundity. It’s like a religious experience. You feel like, oh wow, you see the earth as a whole. You are away from the earth and you realize that you can’t survive out in space. And, you feel this sense of of compassion and and and, pain even.

Just the sense of, oh wow. Like, humans humans are so precious. Life is so precious and what are we what are we doing? You know, like, it’s just this this sense of empathy and and connectedness and oneness that astronauts repeatedly experience when they go into space and they observe the Earth. And so I was thinking, oh, wow.

How wonderful would it be if we could get everybody to experience that? And the way to get everybody to experience that is to commercialize space travel. So let’s commercialize space travel. But I am, you know, a 20 back then, I was a 22 year old Singaporean guy with a mortgage and had bills to pay and, I had a job to do and there was no clear path from what I was doing to helping to commercialize space travel. Right?

And so what the fuck? Right? But, you know, looking back, and so I over those 5 years or so, I became better at processing my feelings. I became better at thinking about my priorities. My priorities shifted and it is now that I’m 29, I’m gonna be 30.

I look back. I don’t feel bad that when I was 22, I was asking big picture questions. I think you should. I think when you’re like 17 to 23 or so 22, that’s that’s, you know, 16 to 21, whatever. Just that face, that late teenage early twenties phase.

It’s a great time to be questioning everything. And I do think you should be questioning everything all your life. Like, you should never get to a point where you feel like, oh, I’ve questioned everything. And now I have the answers, and I’m done. Right?

Like, you know, life solved. Kind of take on the mental of responsibility for paying the bills, if you get married, like all those things, there is there is a burden that comes with that. There is a weight that comes with that and that weight does challenge you to prioritize and thinking about the meaning of life on a day to day basis when you are struggling at work is hard. And I did still do it a little bit, but I did feel trapped in some way and it was just really depressing. I don’t I don’t know if I don’t know if that could have been avoided.

I think the depression was almost a necessary transitional period that I had to go through, which is, you know, it’s kind of a collapse of meaning kind of thing. So before that, I used to I used to blog all the time about Singaporean politics and I and Singaporean news, and I was obsessed with how can we make Singapore a better place? How can we, you know, how can we advance the state of our union, right, as a country. And, you know, when I started work, I was like, you know, what am I doing? Why am I, like, surfing book in between meetings and instead of doing my work and like arguing with strangers on Facebook about politics that I wasn’t probably I probably wasn’t gonna change their minds and I probably wasn’t it just it just felt like I was distracting myself from my life.

And it’s interesting now to contemplate all of this and to look at all of this with hindsight and see that somehow a lot of competing interpretations and explanations are all true. Like, it’s just it was complex. Like, was I distracting myself from work which was challenging and difficult and, you know, like like, I didn’t want I was perfectionist. I didn’t wanna disappoint people. I didn’t I like, it was my first job, so I wanted to do it really well.

And so I was kind of scared about it to some degree. And then that fear would drive me away from the world and lead me to procrastinating by talking politics with strangers. But, like, is it that talking politics with strangers was something that was completely frivolous for me. No. Like, I care.

I do care. I still care. I’m making videos right now to make sense of the progress that I’ve made and to to contextualize all of that. Like, it’s still something that I care about. I mean, I now make enough money from Patreon and from consulting and from, you know, doing a bunch of selling t shirts.

I do a whole bunch of different things. And it took me a lot of work to get to that point. But, you know, so I’m, like, I still I still don’t know how I’m gonna pay my bills, like, a year from now. Like, I I I mean, I I can hypothetically just do consulting work all the way, but like there there is this this this whole game that I’m playing with my life which is figuring out how I’m gonna make money, how I’m gonna I I would like to make more and more money with less and less, grunt work on my part. Meaning, I don’t wanna be trading as much time for money because I wanna save my time to spend on, like, pro social work.

Meaning, making YouTube videos, organizing events, traveling, hosting things, hosting events, getting friends together. Like, there’s all these things in that I know that I can do to contribute to the world, but, like, the world isn’t necessarily gonna pay me for it yet or pay me for it fairly or pay me enough for it. So I need to find other ways to make money and, you know, so I sell t shirts and I I do consulting And so there’s there’s, like, 2, you know, it’s it’s a multi part problem with multiple possible solutions to multiple parts of the solve and which is which is great. It’s, itself. It won’t.

I have to solve it and for me to solve and which is which is great. It’s nice to know, to sit back in my life and to know that alright like here is here is my life. Here are the the conditions in my life. Here are my concerns. Here my my needs, you know, I have to and, you know, even things like here’s my here are my monthly expenses and can I reduce my monthly expenses by changing how much I spend on food?

For example, I can. I can, you know, I can I can eat out less and and plan how I’m gonna cook at home, for example, if that’s my priority or, like, I get to decide what my priorities are and I get to decide, how I want to play that game? Right? And so life is a game in that sense, like, in the sense that you get to decide what’s important and you get to act on what you think is important. And no one else can solve this for you.

No one else can solve this for me. I can talk to people for you know, I can ask people for advice, I guess, but like ultimately it’s my own life and I have to make my own decisions about what I think is ideal. It can be informed by other people’s experiences, but I have to then, you know, every time you ask someone for advice, you then have to decide whether or not you want to take it. You have to process that advice and you have to ask yourself, what makes this advice credible or not? What makes this advice relevant or not?

You know, Like, yeah. So there’s that. We’re 35, 36 minutes in. Do I have some kind of, like, closing statement or closing closing idea here? I think thinking is is good and important and I think people don’t think enough.

But I do think that people can get so, so, you know, different people have different problems and require different solutions. Right? I think for the vast majority of the population on Earth, most people don’t really think very hard about thinking. And, you know, I was talking about school recently on Twitter and how school doesn’t encourage or incentivize you to really think because school is really more of a of a of a game of passing tests and tests are basically kind of fixed. They’re like little puzzles that you have to solve, but you don’t get to question school itself.

You don’t get to skip it. I mean, broadly speaking, you don’t get to question authority and just there are there are ways that school is that disincentivizes you from experimenting with your frame and thinking about things differently. So I find that most people are generally kind of, sloppy thinkers, shoddy thinkers, you know, don’t even really like to think. They kind of go with the flow, follow the hurt, follow other people and I don’t I don’t want to be judgmental or dismissive about that, you know. I I don’t believe that being judgmental and sanctimonious and kind of I’m better than you or whatever shit like that.

I don’t think that helps. So what I want, I want more I want the world to have more good thinkers and the way to do that is to, you know, like is to be like Richard Feynman, Feynman, I feel, which is to to enjoy thinking, to show the to show, you know, he described it as I think the the pleasure of finding things out. Right? And the pleasure of really understanding how things work. Because when you really understand how things work, you can manipulate it and how things work.

Because when you really understand how things work, you can manipulate it and play with it and you become it’s like magic. Right? So I am trying to demonstrate my own love for thinking and for processing information and for making sense of reality. And while that’s the case, there’s also a subset of people who may be overrepresented on Twitter and YouTube who kind of take that to to, almost dysfunctional degree where, you know, you decide that thinking is a good thing and then you become obsessive about it and you become kind of it it becomes like your drug. Like, and you think too much about everything.

You you like there’s you know, when I talk about I have one of my threads is about the the MVP model of personal development. So MVP model is minimum viable product, meaning that, you know, in like, you can and I mentioned this in project management. Right? Like, which is that you can never know everything you need in order to get something done. Like like, if you wanna start a project, if you wanna start a business, you’re never gonna know everything that you need in order to start a business.

It’s just not possible. There’s too many variables. Right? So the way to start a business is to sell something. Right?

So for me, I started out selling t shirts and I didn’t know anything about taxes. I didn’t know anything about accounting. Like, if I had waited to find out all of those things, I would never have sold a single t shirt. So you sell the t shirt first and then you you repeat it. You realize that, oh, like, if I’m selling, like, a lot of t shirts to a lot of people, I need, like, spreadsheet to to keep track of all my sales and then you’re, like, oh, you know, I need to have, like, like, product.

I need to keep track of of what the sizes are and and what’s how much stock I have. Like, you can allow the problems that you are solving to tell you what to think. You know, a couple of videos ago, my audio went bad and I didn’t and I had to then troubleshoot it and figure out why it was going bad. And again, I think that’s optimal because, again, it doesn’t make sense for me to study everything there is about audio before I start making videos. It’s I should just make a video, keep doing it until and when something goes bad, I will learn by trying to fix it.

Right? That’s that’s that is a sort of practical approach to thinking. And it means, you know, being okay not knowing some things so that you can focus on knowing the things that are most consequential, most effective, most powerful. We’ve crossed 40 minutes. I am not super happy about this video.

I think, I should probably have thought a little bit more first about what I was gonna say, but, yeah. I I mean, I think just what I just said, which is that thinking just think about. Think about it. I mean, so okay. Evaluate how much you’ve been thinking in your life.

Like, if you spend all your time thinking, you probably should cut that shit out a little bit. You should you can probably afford to think less. You can probably afford to, you know, do like a weekly review or something and and, you know, like, live your life a little bit. If you don’t spend any time thinking, then you should probably also do a weekly review. Right?

Like, you know, so it’s the unexamined life and unlived life. Like, examine your life unless you’re really overdoing it, in which case do it less. And, I don’t know. Know. I I hope that this Adlib, right, and it is an Adlib, has if you have stuck through with this, thanks.

I would love to hear any questions that you guys have about my thinking journey or or how I think about something specific, and I would love to answer your questions. So, you know, if this video hasn’t answered your questions, at least I can I can it hopefully functions as a trigger for you to ask me questions and I can answer in the replies? So that would be useful, I think. Done.