Its not what you know, its how you think

It's not what you know, it's how you think It's not what you know, it's how you think Late historians Will and Ariel Durant spent four  decades  of their lives  studying,  compiling, and writing the history of  Western  civilization. The product of their  efforts,  The Complete Story of Civilization, went on to  span  several million words across more than 8,800 pages divided into 11  books.Follow Ladders on Flipboard!Follow Ladders’ magazines on Flipboard covering Happiness, Productivity, Job Satisfaction, Neuroscience, and more!After finishing the last one, they  took  on an  arguably  more daunting task:  to summarize all  they had learned into  100 pages  in  The Lessons of History.  It’s an incomplete and generalizing attempt, no doubt,  but it is also one of the most densely packed sources of modern wisdom available to us.There are many  trends  and patterns to be found in the past,  and  the  Durants  do a commendable job of highlighting them. The  essence of their view, however, can be summarized by  the following sentence  from their short book:“The onl y real revolution is in the  enlightenment  of the mind and the  improvement  of character, the only real  emancipation  is individual, and  the only  real revolutionists are philosophers and  saints.”The Durants believed that  despite all that has and continues to change in  our  external environment,  the  real battle is still internal.  Real change doesn’t happen until we  face our minds and our  thoughts.There is a fair degree of  nuance  that  needs to be  accounted for with a statement like that, and  it  ties into larger questions of what progress is  and how subjects relate to objects,  but  the fact that  our thoughts - and their ability to change our minds - play a  pivotal  role  in our experience of reality  is self-evident  in ways that are common sense.  How  we  think affects everything from our ability to solve problems  to how we understand meaning, value, and purpose.  The Durants made it their life’s work to improve this ability in the average person by  d isseminating  information - mostly history and philosophy.But  information alone doesn’t make our thinking better.  We also have to understand and update the way our minds process this information.Our Minds Get Stuck in Habit  LoopsBased  on popular psychology literature,  some  thinkers have  codified  the way  we  form  habits into  a  simple loop:  a  trigger,  a routine, and  a reward.  We see something in our  environment that sets off the trigger;  the trigger leads to a routine we’ve  internalized  based on our past interactions in such an  environment;  finally, a reward at the end  reinforces  said routine.If  you observe this in your daily  life, you’ll see that it’s roughly right.  Our brain is a  pattern-seeking survival  machine,  and  habits are how it  ensures  that we don’t have to think too hard  about  what to do when familiar situations arise,  letting us  conserve  energy.When it comes to the human mind, there are still no  concrete  theories  of how t hought  emerges.  We know, however, that  thought plays a pivotal role in facilitating how we interact with the information  that the Durants, for example, were trying to impart on us.In the  same way that  we  form habits of  action  relating to our environment,  we also  form habits of thought  when  it comes to  how we  think about the world.  We are all born into a reality in which - at first, at least - we can’t even distinguish between our own separateness  from the world.  With  time, however,  we start to recognize patterns around us, and we internalize these patterns - like we do habits - so that we can reuse them in the future.  Usually,  if a  pattern persists in our mental habits, it means that it is valuable in some sense.  But this is only the case if we apply that pattern to the  right information.One of the reasons it’s so hard to change our minds about things is that  our  brains  are stuck in these mental habit loops,  which tend to  look at information fro m a  singular point of  view.  Our brains have learned something in one context, so they mistakenly apply it to others, mixing  up the triggers that lead to routine thoughts.We’re all capable of overpowering these habit loops, of course,  but it’s very easy and productive to  have  them  operating as the default mode.  To think well, we must be aware of their limitations and to not let them restrict us.Diversifying Thinking Patterns  Changes  UsEach of us faces different challenges at different times in different ways based both on our biology and our unique cultural upbringing.  No  two  people think exactly the same way because no two people have lived exactly the same life.In fact,  these  different thinking patterns (mostly  produced from our  mental habit loops) are, in large part, what makes you,  you and me, me.  Our  identities are  borne  from the  convergence  of these patterns.  They create our  subjective experience.The Durants are getting at the idea that  although we’ve seen so much external change throughout history,  none of it truly makes a difference  unless we  calibrate  our internal, subjective experience with that objective, external environment.  Our subjective experience is limited,  and using it - and the thinking patterns that create it - as a baseline for understanding the world is a limited way to go through life.  It biases us in the wrong direction.At its  core,  a  thinking pattern is an implicit rule of thumb for  the way we connect aspects of our reality.  Given the  complexity  of this reality,  the more diverse our trained thinking patterns are - and the better refined the associated triggers are - the more accurately we will be able to interact with information around us.Because thinking patterns emerge from the mental habit loops we form as a response to experience,  the  only way to  diversify them is to  seek out new and conflicting  encounters.  We can do this  through  books, unfamiliar environments, or  even  hypothetical  thought games.Outside of extreme external  circumstances,  any time we’re struggling to solve a problem or lacking  a sense of satisfaction  and meaning,  it’s  due to the fact that our current thinking patterns are  not  adequately  suited for the job.  Instead, we have to remodel the form and shape of these patterns so they better fit the form and shape of the issue at hand.How We Think Is What  MattersWe’re born with a set of biological machinery and some knowledge of how to use it, but in the beginning, we are still mostly unlearned.As time goes on, however, we begin to  make sense of  our reality. We realize what kinds of food are good for us, we learn to avoid things that are painful, and we begin to get attached to those who can take care of us. With even more time,  we develop fully concrete distinctions between the different objects around us and how we, as subjects, are to interact with them.What keeps this process going is our  pattern-seeking brain.  It  forms both  habits of action  and  habits of thought  that it  embeds into our conscious and subconscious memories to  reduce  cognitive  load.One of the problems with this, however, is that  it’s really easy for us to  become stuck in  mental habit loops that don’t accurately assess the situation  at hand,  leading to both  problems of comprehension and  satisfaction.  To  counteract  this,  we have to be  intentional in diversifying our thinking patterns.  We have to  learn to recognize when we’re falling into  a mismatched pattern of thought, and we have to then use that information to update how we make connections  between the objects in our environment.To say that all issues can be solved with a shift in thinking patterns  ignores the larger picture, but there is  a truth  to what the Durants learned from history - how we think about  what is happening around us is arguably more important  than what is actually happening around us.  This article first appeared on D esign Luck.  You might also enjoy… New neuroscience reveals 4 rituals that will make you happy Strangers know your social class in the first seven words you say, study finds 10 lessons from Benjamin Franklin’s daily schedule that will double your productivity The worst mistakes you can make in an interview, according to 12 CEOs 10 habits of mentally strong people