How to Become a Powerful Thinker

【TRANSCRIPT】

Where do these thoughts come from, flowing and winding through the mind like a never-ending river, thought after thought after thought, an infinite stream, each one leading to the next? This river never runs dry. I dip my hands into the river of my own thoughts, take a sip, and wait. Will this next sip lead to strength, clarity, and growth? Or will it lead to weakness,intoxication, and decay?

The river itself is full of paradox. It carries nourishment and sickness in equal measures, because what makes one person sick now might make them strong later. A powerful thinker learns to take the water and filter it to their own needs. 

Like most people, my mind naturally thinks in monologue form. One voice jumps around from thought to thought to thought. For example, it might go: what should I have for lunch? What did I eat yesterday? I can’t believe yesterday went by so fast, time is weird, I wonder what time feels like at the speed of light. The monologue flows like an unfiltered stream. When the waters of thought are unfiltered, I am completely at their whim. 

Sometimes it inflates me, giving me Icarus wings to soar with. I see myself as bigger, better, and higher than I am. It makes me overly confident, prideful, and pompous. It makes me believe that everything I create is good. I see more fault with the rest of the world than myself.

But sometimes, a sip of my own thoughts deflates me. It burdens me. It makes me feel weaker and heavier than I am. It makes me feel useless, worthless, unconfident, and overly critical. I long for the sip that brings nourishment and clarity --the one that helps me see the world as it is.

To obtain that clean sip, I create a filter, a second voice. I transform my internal monologue into a dialogue. The first voice acts as the writer and creator. The second voice acts as the editor and destroyer. The first voice prepares the clay, and the second one shapes it. The second voice counterbalances the first. What would a novel be without revision? Writers have a technical term for this: a poopy first draft. Seriously, without a critical voice to balance your monologue, all your thoughts are just poopy first drafts. This is, perhaps, the greatest lesson I learned from Plato and Socrates. So how do you go about developing this inner dialogue?

My favourite ways are through writing. I start by stating something in my creative voice. For example, I’ll say, “good thinking leads to truth.” Then I try to disprove myself with the destructive voice. I’ll say, “can’t bad thinking lead to truth, too? And what do you mean by truth?” Then my creative voice goes, “truth is a type of knowledge that gives you power. It’s information that allows you to close the gap between the way the world is and the way it ought to be. Truth is the knowledge of how to remove an obstacle or overcome stress. Then my destructive voice goes, “can’t truth cause stress? For example, the truth about your spouse’s infidelity?” Anyways, you get the point.

I have a dialogue with myself, from two opposite points of view, creating something, destroying it, and refining it--constantly working towards an idea that is indestructible, inextinguishable, timeless. The more I practice this method, the more I internalize both voices in my natural thought. Doing this on paper works a lot better, ‘cause if you do this in person, in public, in the corner of a room, everyone will think you’re crazy, which you might be, but they don’t have to know that.

In another technique, I keep two notebooks. In one of them, I perform critical dissections or destructions. I watch a movie, read a book, play a video game, or listen to a song, and I try to dissect it into the parts that make it up. In a story, for example, I peel apart the different components, such as characters, relationships, locations, plot, themes, symbolism, prose, so on and so forth. I try to find what makes a piece work, what doesn’t, and how I might improve it. 

Then, in the other notebook, my creative notebook, I take the different pieces I have gathered and try to assemble them into a new and original work of art. I use it for sketches, prose, poetry, theories, anything really. I try to create a little something in there each day, without filtering or censoring myself.

I use these different notebooks to cultivate the creative and destructive aspects of my personality. This style of learning is similar to taking apart a machine and rebuilding it to find out how it works. The real magic happens when you create something you can’t destroy, disprove, or improve. Maybe you, or someone else, will disprove it in the future, which is good because now you can improve it, but in the meantime, it’s a well-earned opinion or idea that is the closest you can come to truth at the moment.

So, with that said, I’m off to go practice my dialectic. 

You’re dumb!

No, you’re dumb!

You’re dumb!

No, you’re dumb!

You’re dumb! 

No!

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【VOCABULARY】

intoxication – n.  is the state of being drunk

paradox– v.  You describe a situation as a paradox when it involves two or more facts or qualities that seem to contradict each other. 

filter – v. it means to pass it through a device which is designed to remove certain particles contained in it.

pompous – adj. If you describe someone as pompous you mean that they behave or speak in a very serious way because they think they are more important than they really are.

infidelity– n. it occurs when a person who is married or in a steady relationship has sex with another person.