How To Increase Your Intelligence and Become A Deep Thinker

In a world of endless convenience, we face acquired tragedy. The gradual erosion of our ability to think deeply. When every answer sits only a click away, what we're actually missing is the rare clarity that comes only from grappling with ideas ourselves. Welcome to the Growth Mindset Psychology podcast, a space devoted to resisting our. Cultures demand for sound bites and cultivating something richer, thoughtful inquiry, deep understanding and intellectual independence.

I am Samuel Webster Harris and today we're exploring the rare and increasingly necessary craft of deep thinking. We'll be asking what it means to reclaim our minds from the tyranny of convenience. If you want to be a high performer, an inventor, a writer, or simply make better decisions in your life, or maybe you want to have greater control of your emotions instead of reacting to, the strings that the world pulls on your mind. Well, all of those desires

would require you to learn to be a deeper thinker. Conveniently, that is what this episode is about. We're going to learn the ways that we take mental shortcuts and absorb opinions that aren't our own and instead we're going to find out how to train our mind to be a deeper, question up, to doubt, easy answers and see beyond the surface of our thoughts and

appreciate the beauty in complexity. We'll be learning about daily habits to help us understand the world and ourselves in a much more profound way and if you are willing to travel with me and go deep, you might find a lot more clarity you didn't realise was even missing. Stay tuned.

This podcast is available to everyone for free because of advertisers. If you would like to support the show and then return listen to an ad re-version, access our private content and join our discord community for advice, accountability and our co-working sessions,

it is only $5 a month and you can find out more at growthmindset.subacast.com or by looking in the episode description. This episode is brought to you by Amazon. The holidays are here and you know what that means. It's time to get your friends and family the gifts they deserve. Take the stress set of shopping with Amazon's great deals and low prices on a huge range of items from toys

to tech and much more. Whoever you're gifting for, Amazon has great prices on everything you need this holiday season. Shop Black Friday Week starting November 21st. I confess that I have been on a bit of a cow-new port binge lately and I'm a big fan of his books like Deep Work and Slow Productivity and this episode will cover some of my favourite concepts of his to help you cultivate

deeper thinking and to live with deeper purpose behind our actions. Kicking off the episode, I actually want to use Charlie Munger's approach of inversion and identify the main habits that ruin deep thinking and encourage us to fall back on shallow thinking because these are of course the things we need to learn to be avoiding and will help us make sense of the habits we then want to cultivate. So the first big mistake that we make is outsourcing our thinking to others.

The internet, social media, it turns us into parrots. We'll hear something and think, whoop, that sounds clever. And then we promptly repeat it without a second thought. We let our

moral compass be calibrated by whatever our online tribe is saying this week. We don't realize that we're doing this or that we're giving people unrivaled access to our own opinions. Things that we hear, things that we read in sub-stack or newspapers, things that are shared on social media or by some podcaster, we let their beliefs be our beliefs. We take on rapid confirmation bias without actually questioning why we're accepting these ideas.

Now, sure, there can be some wisdom in crowds and other human. We need shortcuts to get along in life and we need to let a lot of ideology sink into our thinking patterns without questioning it to integrate into society. But we need to become aware of so many opinions that are coming at us that we haven't received a well-rounded view on before we agree with an opinion. The second mistake we make is prioritising fast emotional hits. I'm hardly going out there when

I say in the modern age. Our minds are becoming very accustomed to quick fixes. It's not just our thoughts that outsource to other people these days, it's our emotions too. We aren't used to doing hard work to feel good. Why bother with the slow business of working things out or reading a book when we can get a dopamine hit from a notification on our phone? Instead, we'll... We prefer to scroll, swipe, consume, using to pay our attention to the fleeting sparks of

notifications over stillness. Our increasing screen time is a silent killer of our own ability to think for ourselves. Our phones are like little sugar dispenses, feeling as just enough excitement

to keep us scrolling but never enough to be truly fulfilling. It's the intellectual equivalent of eating candy floss all day. And the final thing I want to talk about on this is checklist mentality. We have a collective obsession with lists. The internet is full of secret hacks to six figures or five-minute mindfulness as if you could transform your life by using a quick checklist and a bit of motivation. It all sounds wonderful but the reality is it takes a long time to achieve anything.

Even what I'm going to lay down in this episode is going to take you six months to a year to start feeling all the benefits and just listening to it once isn't going to actually change your life. It's the habits and practices you have to put in place. Now, looking at those three habits I've mentioned, outsourcing our thinking to others, prioritising quick emotional satisfaction, mainly using our phones and checklist mentality. All of these habits push us into the fast system one

automatic thinking where we use a heuristic to make a decision. For example, we might think, do I like this person or does what they're saying make me feel good? If yes, okay, I'll believe what they're saying. Instead, a deeper thinker will use that slower system two style thinking which requires deliberate and analytical parts of the mind to question and critically

examine information. These people are genuinely curious. They like to take things apart and figure out how they work. They certainly won't rush to the end of the list and expect to get any benefits from it without taking a very slow and steady time about doing each task. And they're the ones who are more interested to read something that disagrees with their opinion and consider what it means rather than finding things they do agree with. These people really value quality information in

viewpoints and resist the urge to settle for quick answers. It's much slower, yes, it might feel less glamorous in this world of speed and feeling like you do have answers, but there's something much more admirably solid about it and that's what we're going to be aiming for today. So, now let's go on to the habits we can focus on to directly combat these shallow thinking fantasies. Firstly, we want to focus on improving the quality of information we consume whilst decreasing the

quantity of it. We are drowning in information. Even though that information might only be a few inches deep, we're being bombarded by it, facts, figures, videos, anything that can take up our attention. Instead, we need to be more sensitive to where our attention goes and prioritize higher quality information whilst dumping all that time that we spend on social media or consuming highly processed information that doesn't give us the chance to think for ourselves.

Cal Newport suggests that to build this habit, we should look at different timescales of our consumption habits over a daily, monthly, and seasonal scale. On a daily level, he advises we should choose one high quality new source that is an algorithmic, such as a curated newsletter or podcast, try to find sources that question both sides or, on purpose, they find opposing sources from both

sides of an argument. Then, on a monthly scale, we should try to be making time to deeply engage with topics, entacling a few deep topics amongst using sources like the New Yorker, Atlantic, Farron Affairs, New Scientist. Perhaps maybe once a week go to a coffee shop to read real printed articles and engage with professional journalism or deeper philosophy and try to avoid attention

grabbing headlines, coming at you on your phone. Then, on a seasonal scale, we should be consuming books instead of relying on news and social media to tell us what to think about. Israel and Gaza, for example, is worth reading books about the history of the situation by Named Chonsky or Rashid Kalisi, and you'll understand the whole thing in much more depth than any

TikTok or 30-second news broadcast. Whatever you think you care about, you should spend time to get a comprehensive and nuanced understanding where it takes you multiple weeks to consume the material. If you find yourself forming a strong opinion about something after a day, you have no place having a strong opinion when you really don't know everything about something, because you've only been given easy answers. These days, over 50% of people get some of their

news from social media. How dumb is that compared to the approach we've just outlined? So please don't let that be you. I'll give you an example of how you might put this into practice. Let's say you're really into technology. Instead of flipping between Reddit threads and Hacker news, you could subscribe to a curated newsletter like Ben Thompson's Trotechery. Then maybe once a week you can read five long-form articles from the MIT Tech Review or Fence and Time tackling a

book on the history of innovation. And by doing that, you'll have a much better idea about how technology impacts the world and what's going on, and consuming attention-grabbing headlines. And then when it comes to general principles, of course, you can't read or watch pure hard thinking, high-quality non-fiction, deep thing every single moment of your free time. For example, I thought that BBC Documentary series on the Iraq War following its 20th

anniversary was fantastic. They also did a similar one on the troubles in Ireland. They were both brilliant documentaries that taught you a lot, but if you watch them every single evening for two weeks, it would be really depressing and hard work. So when it comes to your entertainment, try and space it out with a ratio of maybe one to one fun things to smart things. They will keep you balanced and enjoying it, but will really help you stay much more informed

and build your own personal wisdom. Now onto the second habit. Here we need to increase our comfort with boredom. When we have Slack, email, social media, we're at a point now where the average worker switches tasks every three minutes and they don't know how to handle boredom when they're in a task that takes more time because they're too used to fast stimulation.

It's been shown that simply having a smartphone present, whether that's in your pocket or in your desk, having that there in your presence, genuinely reduces your cognitive capacity, which is insane. Our attention spans have decreased by 35% in the last 20 years. As we've actively

retrained our brains to expect them to be occupied easily. ADHD is growing like crazy, as we are rewiring our brains to have worse attention. So to start combating this and to start thinking more deeply, so that we can do great work, we need to train our comfort with boredom. Our brains need to feel comfortable in the absence of constant novel stimuli. If we have any chance of being able to conduct really deep and serious thinking, boredom is where good ideas

happen and is where our brain becomes truly creative. If we can resist the easy to grab shortcuts for alleviating boredom of which there are infinite shortcuts available on our phone, instead our brain learns to start coming up with productive and useful solutions to alleviate boredom, like coming

up with creative ideas and turning things over in our mind that are important to us. So besides some obvious advice like removing social media from your phone and turning off notifications, you also might want to remove your email accounts if you find yourself checking them on your phone a lot, and if you're prone to things like checking crypto prices or apps, you might want to remove

those. Anything that you have on your phone that is not essential and you find yourself often going to, you should probably try and get rid of it and you can check the apps that appear on your screen time to really see where this lies. Besides sanitizing your phone, you also want to try building up more daily phone free activities. Go on some specified daily routines that you have

without a phone. Maybe visit the local shop or take the trash out, do them for five or ten minutes whilst leaving your phone behind and get used to being a human that has a phone that isn't permanently glued to them somewhere in their pocket or hand. Then you want to start trying to do longer things like reading a book or taking a walk without a phone and resisting that noise to always be listening to music or a podcast and instead just being with your thoughts.

When you do this, you're turning off all the thoughts of other people that we're always consuming and instead we're learning to think our own thoughts for a second. Finally, perhaps on the weekend, try and grow this activity and take a longer walk for an hour, maybe two without your phone and reducing your attachment to it. Of course doing actual meditation as well is a really good habit, but I know a lot of people really resist that because when they first start

doing it, they basically fail and it feels unproductive and useless. Whereas I find that spending some time without my phone, you get some instant really good results from it. If you just go for a 20 minute walk without your phone, you come back feeling so refreshed and like, it's free human that can do what the hell it wants and you're like, wow, I can think of my own thoughts and

I find that's much easier to grow than meditation personally. The other thing you want to do is when you're in the house, try and have a location in the home where your phone is kept all the time. Cal Newport calls us the phone foyer method and this means that you just keep your phone plugged in at one specific location where your phone lives and try not to keep that location as your bedroom

or the kitchen. This of course stops you from having it always in your pocket or on the desk in front of you and it creates some really useful friction to having the always available instant distraction device to hand where the moment you're wearing this board, it can always go on your phone and find something to occupy it. Of course, your phone is still a useful device and it can be used for useful things whilst you do this and you can take calls but you're importantly reducing

your dependence on it. Doing all these things will really help increase our comfort with boredom and becoming more creative and next we want to start working on cultivating our attention. Whether you do genuinely have real ADHD or not, there's technically nothing stopping you from the ability to actually pay attention to things. In fact, ADHD can give you the issue of having

too much attention sometimes. Regardless, many of us struggle to focus for extended periods of time due to our distraction rituals that we build up, which these days mostly come from the internet and our phones and some people have the TV on in the background which blows my mind and I kind of forget that exists until I go to someone's house and it really unsettles me but if you have the

TV on in the background, please don't have the TV on in the background. Instead, we want to be training our attention and you can use interval training for this just like you might do interval training for intense physical activity to build your physical stamina. By deeply focusing on a single task for even a very small period of time, you can get comfortable concentrating and then start to slowly extend the time. Let's say you struggle to read books, you can start by reading

a single page a day. Trust me, anyone can read a single page of a book but once you do that daily, it's easier to build that up. As a general principle, it's best to start small with any habit. Try and set yourself a 10 minute interval to just focus deeply on one task without looking at your phone and once you're comfortable, gradually increase it to 15 minutes and then 20 minutes and so on and you'll find yourself building that habit of being able to focus on one thing

and it's not feeling like a scary big task to jump into. Try and set yourself specific goals for your different tasks whether they're work related, reading, even watching a movie without interruption. The goal here is to just sustain attention without reaching for external stimulation. For example, something I'm working on is the fact that I can focus for hours in a row on my writing when it is

the night before I have to release an episode. But where I struggle is keeping my attention on my writing when there isn't an element of urgency and I'm working on training that, starting with just half an hour a day of something small, I initially thought well I can write for hours when it's

urgent so I must be able to just write all morning five days early but I can't so instead I've started with half an hour of writing and I can definitely do half an hour of writing and once I've actually started doing half an hour it's often not so hard to extend to an hour but having the overly ambitious goal of three hours of writing when it wasn't urgent really didn't work for me. Of course you can use your environments and rituals to help queue you into the task soap.

A dedicated space or playlist might really help kick your brain into gear and if possible definitely remove all technology all together and use a pen and paper when you can and you'll be surprised how much easier it makes it to focus when you don't have to constantly choose to focus on the hard thing against other easier options because there are no other options. Whilst you're training your attention it can be really helpful to track your progress on just this item or something that I

finally got my head around lately is time tracking in general on all work. As a warning I have tried to do this several times over the years before and failed completely so I wouldn't put any pressure on you here to get this straight away but for me it's been super useful because I do suffer a lot from time blindness and logging what I do each day has been really eye-opening to see where the time goes and help you be more aware of when I'm clearly going off track and it helps build a bit more

awareness of my choices. One of the finalities I fell into when I wanted to do a three hour writing block was I'd say to myself like I'll just do email for 15 minutes before I start writing and then after that I'll just check LinkedIn for like 15 minutes only 15 minutes and then the next

thing I'd be like well I just need to do 15 minutes of reading about the inventor of rollercoaster tycoon because he wrote 99% of all that code by himself that is crazy and oh crap the morning's gone and I haven't done any writing and yeah that was basically the hit story of most of my

mornings for the last year and it's amazing how your mind will find anything else to do when you try to give it a big long task that it's geared by but if you do turn all of your technology off and write a plan for what you're going to do and set a small manageable time limit for your first

task of maybe only 15 minutes but a task you actually should be doing you'll be surprised that it does get done and your attention will start to build this morning I wrote for half an hour about something that is totally not urgent and I am very proud of myself and I'm sure you can do this too now onto the fourth step in our quest for thinking deeply this step is about increasing your working memory memory is essential to hold manipulate and connect pieces of information in our

minds. Nikola Tesla was infamous for his extraordinary ability to visualize and work through complex inventions entirely in his mind kind of like a real life scientific inventor version of Sherlock Holmes Tesla would mentally assemble inventions and run them in his imagination checking

for flaws before the effort of building a real physical model now of course you might not want to be trying to reinvent the electricity network but if you want to connect dots and compare different complex thoughts you need to work on your memory capacity and that is a completely possible feed

for humanity have books many humans could remember an entire book length of a story so you can certainly hold a few more things up in your mind too it's proven with training that you can increase your capacity for digit retention by 30% but what's more important is retaining concepts

and working with them there's a technique called productive meditation where you focus on the single and complex specific problem and you can do this whilst you're taking a walk or engaging in any low stimulation activity you know cleaning cooking and whilst you're doing this what you want to

do is to stay focused on one problem and try to attack it from different angles it really helps you practice juggling multiple ideas in your head and improve your ability to conduct structured thinking without external aids the reason you should do this is because it's a similar concept to the fact

that it's very hard to become a good mathematician if you always use a calculator because this blocks your ability to actually think about how numbers work together and that means that you can't wrestle with complex mathematical concepts in your mind when you've only ever used a calculator to

even just do addition in a modern day with our phones you can always google a problem or rely on the new source for opinions instead of forming your own this is bad on many ways and it primes us to think these thoughts as our opinion without us doing the own work of coming to a solution ourselves

there's a technique for meetings in Japan where the most junior person offers their ideas first so that they can offer their unique insights and aren't swayed by more senior people in the organization because if a more senior person shares their opinion first junior people are much more

like to just agree with them instead of coming up with novel ideas following this how can you say that you are in control of your own opinions if you always let yourself get primed on your opinions by letting other people tell you about theirs first the internet is like a calculator that does the thinking for us but stops us from wrestling with the concepts ourselves so try to get away from it more like we've already mentioned walks without a phone are really useful but now think about how you

can use them productively to battle with different concepts married curie for example she used to go on long walks relying on her own working memory to think about complex relationships between physics and chemistry and reflect on her research as she walked this mental endurance helped her

achieve groundbreaking discoveries as she built the capacity in her mind to wrestle with quite a few deep topics at once okay we're going to have a quick ad break now talk about our sponsors who keep the show running and we're back to learn about how to think intellectually about anything

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the art of thinking like an intellectual which I'm going to break into three main sections it's important to realize that intellectual practice isn't just about acquiring knowledge it's much more about cultivating curiosity seeking nuanced understanding and integrating ideas

into a complex organized world view the goal is to develop a stance of inquiry where you look beyond surface level information and engage much more deeply with subjects whether these are artistic for the softacle or technical the first thing I want you to do here is to pair primary

and secondary sources together but instead of just reading this primary content like a classical novel or a scientific paper first it's worth exploring secondary sources commentaries critiques analyses and this can help us give different viewpoints and ways of thinking about

this primary content so that we can understand it in more depth and argue with it as we read it perhaps you are really into stochasticism lately and you want to read Marcus or releases meditations but you might first want to read some Ryan Holiday the modern stoic author who's

written about Marcus or release a lot or perhaps you want to listen to a stochastic podcast doing this practice will provide a better framework for you to understand and appreciate the primary source when you do read it the next habit here is a practice popularized by Richard Feiman

although I'm sure it's been around for centuries what he advises is to try to maintain idea documents that are ongoing explorations of your thoughts on various topics these documents serve as spaces for reflecting on subjects analyzing arguments integrating knowledge and integrating knowledge

and doing this will really help you structure and refine your thinking and provides a record of intellectual growth for you doing this I find can be particularly helpful in retaining complex information and to see connection between different ideas over time I did a whole episode on

Richard Feiman's method for becoming an expert on any topic that's really worth listening to and I'll stick a link to that in the show description and I'll also put some notes in the show description of some of his own example idea documents that you can use to help you structure your

own approach if you want to try doing this give a quick overview of how he builds these documents he starts by choosing a topic or a theme that he's very interested in and wants to understand in depth then you list all the key concepts and questions that you might have to explore over time

and have them listed at the top of your document and of course feel free to add more things to this list over time as you go through things and find out more ideas you want to know then in the main body of your document explore the topic summarize everything you learn and synthesize new information

with previous knowledge writing all the summaries in your own words and comparing different perspectives next add a section for questions reflections and maybe puzzles which are trying to solve so for example in Feiman's document on quantum physics he had questions on why when you observe a quantum

particle does it change its behavior it was a problem he wanted to solve and think about and is worth him having that prompt to remind him to look for different connections he could make then in the final section what you want to do is start making connections to other fields that

you might have been reflecting on in other documents this will help you build a web of knowledge where you might connect ideas from physics to philosophy and it'll help you build a deeper understanding of the world around you and how it all interacts together now of course this is a reasonable amount of work and doing this is hard unless you are a very interested person in the topic but I find it hugely rewarding and also much easier to do if you have a reason to publish some of these notes

you see it all the time online there are people who run a newsletter or a podcast on a specific topic and they get to think very deeply about it and become an expert so if there is an area that you really want to geek out on try exploring it by teaching it that could be in short little

tweets maybe running a substack or even starting your own podcast or YouTube now before going all in starting a YouTube channel I'd start with just writing the odd tweet or something on it first to see if it's worth doing because there's no need to quadruple the size of your homework for no

reason moving on to the final habit of becoming a more intellectual thinker and this is the practice of adopting intellectual curiosity and thinking more critically we want to build a combination of humility to recognize that there's always more to learn on the topic whilst also having a stubborn

approach to being more argumentative over any stance that is proposed to us when you look at any topic in the world there is always complex and contradictory viewpoints if you can foster a deeper sense of curiosity and willingness to engage with new ideas you then deepen your understanding

of the world so if you are interested in the news try reading news from opposite ends of the political spectrum or from entire different nations and this principle applies to anything you should have multiple sources on anything you're diving into then when it comes to being more

argumentative unless they're a pushover if you're reading a book or listening to a podcaster that you love argue with them simply for the sake of questioning the ideas that are going into your mind Charlie Mungert said that you shouldn't hold a belief unless you can argue the

opposite opinion better than the person opposing you and doing this really helps broaden your perspective reduces your bias and improves your problem solving ability so much of the work that people need to do when they are in coaching or therapy is essentially just questioning their assumptions

and thinking and imagining the world from the opposite viewpoint and it's incredible how simple and yet effective this is for solving people's problems something I do now when I write my notes on a book is I always have a section where I talk about its weaknesses or anything I thought could

be wrong even if I love the book I still force myself to find something about it that could be improved of course being argumentative in a conflicting way isn't helpful but when you argue with ideas and people out of intellectual curiosity it can be really beneficial and a healthy level

of arguing I think is essential Benjamin Franklin for example was a renowned deep thinker and intellectually curious person he looked deeply into philosophy science inventions and politics and he became an incredibly effective polymath one thing that he did was create a club for deep thinkers

where it discussed books debated philosophy and they had healthy arguments with each other and conducted experiments his habit of intellectual exploration helped him to become such an effective polymath and helped him influence everything from his inventions to his role in shaping the united

states of America so following that inside an idea I've been excited to kick off for a while is launching a book club within the premium membership where we tackle one book a month mainly in the field of psychology but we'll possibly branch into things like philosophy economics

science and probably not too much self help but who knows so if that interests you the link to the premium membership is in the description and you also get ad free listing and the ability to join our discord and co-working sessions as well reflecting on the things we've learnt on this

episode some other things that I've been working on in the goal of becoming a deeper wider thinker to seem relevant for me to share now I have thoroughly enjoyed running this podcast and exploring growth mindset psychology self-improvement and branching into philosophy for almost eight

years now but I'm ready to start focusing more on some specific key areas and rebranding the show with a much greater psychology focus and moving a bit further away from self-improvement as a genre as I do feel like a lot of my content is self help for people who don't like self help and I also

feel like I've explored enough areas now I'm starting to repeat a lot of my own opinions and I'm ready to move on to bigger and bolder things and practice deeper thinking in them so when I said the show will be more about psychology I want to go more specifically into breaking down the

psychology of different emotions that we feel and things that we might struggle with like our attention or romance but also diving into a topic like breaking down the psychology arcs of a given movie and in the internal mindset journeys of the main character to educate people with like

a university level worth of psychology but in a very engaging and easy to digest way the builds curiosity and wonder at the same time regardless that will all be happening next year so don't panic just yet but if you do have any thoughts from me do let me know on my email growth mindset podcast

at gmail.com or feel free to book a free call with me on Wednesday afternoons with the link in the description to chat about that or anything else you're interested in the other thing that I'm planning on the subject of being a deep thinker and having idea documents and wrestling with ideas

from all over the place is starting a second podcast on the history of innovation and my goal here will be to start from basically the beginning of humanity's inventions up to the modern day and each year that I run the podcast I want to cover one era and break down all the most impactful inventions

from that time and the whole show will probably take me 10 to 15 years to make and when I say innovation I don't just mean a scientific innovation I mean any innovation that changed the world like the stock market is an innovation hammer Arby's legal code was an innovation Christianity was an

innovation and why would I do it in sequential order over like 15 years well I feel like taking on something epic and as I've mentioned in this episode the importance of putting ideas together and really understanding how things work and combining them is a really delightful activity when

you do it properly and as a human navigating the world I make by far most of my money these days from investing and to help you do that deeply understanding how the world changes over cycles I think is going to be key in navigating the present day with things like AI cryptocurrencies and

are increasingly creaky political systems that are just all over the place so looking into the history of innovation has been an idea I've had for a while and just can't seem to get out of my head and I've even started doing a lot of pre reading this year and I have some idea documents

already on the go and I'm excited to start putting this all together it's a project for next year but you're welcome to hit me up to talk about it if you want anyway what did we learn this episode just to give you a refresh before you head off into your new life as a deep thinker well deep

thinking isn't unnatural state these days and you really need to cultivate habits to push your brain to do the hard work of seeking clarity instead of taking easy shortcuts your phone is definitely the biggest productivity blocker in your life followed by an internet connection both of which are

beautifully ironic because they are also the thing that are most useful to us as a functioning human that wants to learn things but they are also the most damaging when used incorrectly if you practice increasing the quality of the information you consume,

increasing your ability to deal with boredom, cultivating your attention, strengthening your working memory and finally being a more critical think and actively pursuing an intellectual path to your information that you consume that will meaningfully change your life over the next six

months to a year if you start putting these things into a habit you'll experience a step change in your ability to understand the world and to also not be surprised by outcomes that you didn't plan for and you'll have much better ideas and more creative solutions to your problems

I'm not saying it's easy but I do hope you get used to a bit more boredom in your life and enjoying walks being an intellectual who are using with anyone that comes near you and if anyone is rude to you in turn where you can use your newfound giant working memory to never forget them right on the subject of making connections you may or may not have friends but if you do I challenge you to think of a friend who would love this episode I'm sure you

know one person at least and I ask if you could share this episode with them. Lastly I can highly recommend Cal Newport's new book Slow Productivity if you like this episode or in fact any of his books are pretty good and he's just a total legend and on that please stay deep. Thank you so much for listening. You're consistency to reach the end of an episode is legendary.

I'm a hero but when we learn things it's important to reflect so I politely invite you to take a pause rifle through the biggest ideas you just heard so here's your opportunity to hit pause and have a think. Okay did you wrestle with some insights information doesn't stick when we race from one podcast to the next without using our brain to play with the knowledge so here's another go at a pause. Alrighty I'll let you off to continue with your life now. If you have any ideas

or feedback for the show I'm always interested to hear from you. Yes! And other than that please stay curious. Curious, groan, smiling for no reason.