The Right Side of Thought - More To That

Reflecting on the nature of thought may not come naturally, but it can be trained with consistent practice. In the same way our muscles don’t bulk up without physical exercise, our minds won’t sharpen up without adequate mental training. Contemplative practices like meditation and prayer contribute to this type of project, but much of it starts by ... See more

Whereas I like to view sustained periods of thought as the only accessible avenue of examination and contemplation.

How you think about the world fundamentally dictates the actions you take in it. A framework of thought is the pre-requisite to any form of action, and it can only be constructed with the ideas you’ve subscribed to.

There is an inescapable reality to the consequences of human thought. To realize this, all you need to do is to stop what you’re doing for a moment and take a quick look around.

At this point, some of you may be asking, “Being on the right side of thought is great and all, but is it really that important to spend your time thinking? After all, reflection doesn’t put food on the table, it doesn’t get the world’s businesses moving, and it sure as hell won’t drive my ass to work. So what’s the point?”

Our thoughts provide the lens in which we view the world, and have created everything we experience today. To denounce their existence would render us delusional, but to give them unchecked power would turn us into slaves. The true power of thought resides somewhere between these poles, and that point can only be accessed through the careful examin... See more

“Reflection matters because it is continuous with practice. How you think about what you are doing affects how you do it, or whether you do it at all. It may direct your research, or your attitude to people who do things different, or indeed your whole life.”

Ideas are the software that run on the hardware of our minds, and reflection is the only tool we have to reliably maintain and update it.

The very smartphone or laptop you may be using to read this is the result of thousands of minds, all thinking together about what it takes to extract raw materials from the Earth, assemble everything into the singular shape you see now, imbue it with the properties of computational power, and cleverly market the resulting device so your hard-earned... See more