How to be a great thinker

Business Times

23-05-2025

MOST people are getting dumber. Largely because of the smartphone, we're in an era of declining attention spans, reading skills, numeracy and verbal reasoning. How to buck the trend? I've charted seven intellectual habits of the best thinkers.
True, these people exist in a different league from the rest of us. To use an analogy from computing, their high processing power allows them to crunch vast amounts of data from multiple domains. In other words, they have intellectual overcapacity. Still, we can learn from their methods. These can sound obvious, but few people live by them.
Read books. A book is still the best technology to convey the nuanced complexity of the world. That complexity is a check on pure ideology. People who want to simplify the world will prefer online conspiracy theories.
Don't use screens much. That frees time for books and creates more interstitial moments when the mind is left unoccupied, has freedom to roam and makes new connections. Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche and Immanuel Kant experienced these moments on walks. The biochemist Jennifer Doudna says she gets insights when 'out weeding my tomato plants' or while asleep.
Do your own work, not the world's. The best thinkers don't waste much time maximising their income or climbing hierarchies. Doudna left the University of California, Berkeley to lead discovery research at biotech company Genentech. She lasted two months there. Needing full scientific freedom, she returned to Berkeley, where she ended up winning the chemistry Nobel Prize for co-inventing the gene-editing tool Crispr.
Be multidisciplinary. Pre-war Vienna produced thinkers including Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Hayek, Kurt Godel and the irreducible polymath John von Neumann. The structure of the city's university helped. Most subjects were taught within the faculties of either law or philosophy. That blurred boundaries between disciplines, writes Richard Cockett in Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World. 'There were no arbitrary divisions between 'science' and 'humanities' – all was 'philosophy', in its purest sense, the study of fundamental questions.'
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Hayek, for instance, 'trained at home as a botanist to a quasi-professional level; he then graduated in law, received a doctorate in political science from the university, but... spent most of his time there studying psychology, all before becoming a revered economist.'
Breaking through silos goes against the set-up of modern academia. It also requires unprecedented processing power, given how much knowledge has accumulated in each field. But insights from one discipline can still revolutionise another. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for economics for his findings on human irrationality.
Be an empiricist who values ideas. During World War II, Isaiah Berlin was first secretary at the British embassy in Washington. His weekly reports on the American political situation were brilliant empirical accounts of the world as it was. They mesmerised Winston Churchill, who was desperate to meet Berlin. (Due to a mix-up, Churchill invited Irving Berlin for lunch instead. The composer was baffled to be asked by Churchill himself: 'When do you think the European war will end?')
In March 1944, Isaiah Berlin returned from Washington to London on a bomber plane. He had to wear an oxygen mask all flight, wasn't allowed to sleep for fear he would suffocate, and couldn't read as there was no light. 'One was therefore reduced to a most terrible thing,' he recalled, 'to having to think – and I had to think for about seven or eight hours in this bomber.' During this long interstitial moment, Berlin decided to become an historian of ideas. He ended up writing the classic essays The Hedgehog and the Fox and Two Concepts of Liberty.
Always assume you might be wrong. Mediocre thinkers prefer to confirm their initial assumptions. This 'confirmation bias' stops them reaching new or deeper insights. By contrast, Darwin was always composing arguments against his own theories.
Keep learning from everyone. Only mediocrities boast as adults about where they went to university aged 18. They imagine that intelligence is innate and static. In fact, people become more or less intelligent through life, depending on how hard they think. The best thinkers are always learning from others, no matter how young or low-status. I remember being at a dinner table where the two people who talked least and listened hardest were the two Nobel laureates. FINANCIAL TIMES