How to Think for Yourself

Independent-Mindedness: A Key to Novel Ideas

In certain fields of work, such as science, investment, and entrepreneurship, it's not enough to be correct. Your ideas must be novel and unique. This is because these fields require you to say or predict things that no one else has realized yet. For instance, as an investor, if many people make the same prediction as you, the stock price will already reflect it, leaving no room for profit. The only valuable insights are the ones most other investors don't share.

Similarly, as a startup founder, you don't want to start a business that everyone agrees is a good idea, or there will already be other companies doing it. You have to do something that sounds to most other people like a bad idea, but that you know isn't.

However, this pattern of independent-mindedness is not universal. In most kinds of work, such as administration, all you need is to be right. It's not essential that everyone else be wrong. There's room for a little novelty in most kinds of work, but there's a fairly sharp distinction between the kinds of work where it's essential to be independent-minded, and the kinds where it's not.

Independent-mindedness seems to be more a matter of nature than nurture. If you pick the wrong type of work, you're likely to be unhappy. If you're naturally independent-minded, you'll find it frustrating to be a middle manager. And if you're naturally conventional-minded, you'll be sailing into a headwind if you try to do original research.

Independent-mindedness has three components: fastidiousness about truth, resistance to being told what to think, and curiosity. Fastidiousness about truth means being careful about the degree of belief. Independent-minded people have a horror of ideologies, which require one to accept a whole collection of beliefs at once. Resistance to being told what to think is not just a kind of immunity. In the most independent-minded people, it's an active delight in ideas that subvert the conventional wisdom. Curiosity is the compass here. If your goal is to discover novel ideas, your motto should not be "do what you love" so much as "do what you're curious about."

In conclusion, independent-mindedness is a crucial quality for those seeking to generate novel ideas. Cultivating this quality involves nurturing curiosity, resisting conformity, and maintaining a rigorous commitment to truth.

The original article: http://paulgraham.com/think.html