What is up everyone this is Alex Lieberman co-founder and CEO of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder's Journal my personal audio diary where I give you the business builder the tools you need to think better in order to build better whether that's building a business a team or new product.

As I've gotten older I have realized that one of the biggest competitive advantages in my career is an ability to think independently independent thinking means solving problems in new and novel ways.

Independent thinking means looking at the world three different lens than most independent thinking means questioning commonly held beliefs or assumptions for their merit rather than their acceptance.

I truly believe independent thought is what pushes the world forward yet few of us are able to do it effectively.

Today's journal is about what it means to be an independent thinker and what you can do to start thinking for yourself rather than in accordance with others let's hop into it.

I would venture to say that 95% of people minimum are group thinkers and 5% of people are independent thinkers and when I think about you know is this a bad thing my gut reaction is no.

Because I would argue that most jobs in society don't require independent thought and I do think it's an inevitability that most people will use consensus or the thoughts of others to form their own views.

But I also believe that to be a great entrepreneur or a great builder you do need to be able to think for yourself and unfortunately I don't think society or the education system are necessarily set up to nurture us into independent thought most of our life is spent studying the actions of others.

Understanding commonly held beliefs and being tested and ranked according to our ability to answer preset problems based on those beliefs and again this isn't inherently bad but if we want people to be independent thinkers we need to give them the tools to be independent thinkers.

Paul Graham who's an incredibly famous investor wrote a profound essay about what it means to be an independent thinker and it's important to understand what are the criteria that make up independent thinking in order to find ways to work on the muscle of thinking differently.

The first trait that he talks about is fastidiousness about truth big word fancy way of basically saying that to be an independent thinker is to be a perfectionist about finding the truth if you're fastidious about truth you are allergic to when people say the phrase we do it this way because this is how things have always been done.

You view that way of thinking as sloppy and you want to examine for yourself whether the way that things have always been done is actually the right way of doing things.

The second trait of independent thinking is resistance to being told what to think people may think this is a negative quality like you know you're too good for people or you don't care what they have to say but that's not at all what it is.

It's more so that you take pride in finding answers for yourself sometimes that answer may be new novel or innovative and sometimes you'll come to the same conclusion as those who told you what to think but at least you've gotten to the conclusion of what to think under your own authority.

And the third trait of independent thinking is curiosity this is what allows you to think of novel ideas ideas that seem crazy and tend to violate conventional wisdom ideas that make people laugh when they hear them curiosity is the jet fuel for independent thinking and according to program independent mindedness and curiosity are predictive of one another he basically said that everyone he knows who is independent minded is deeply curious.

Is deeply curious and everyone who is conventional minded isn't deeply curious so obviously all this sounds great and when you hear this you're probably thinking to yourself yeah I want to be an independent thinker I want to hunt for the truth I want to think for myself and I want to be endlessly curious.

But the question is how do we build these muscles in order to flex our independent thinking especially when a lot of independent thinking honestly I think comes down to nature but I do think we all can develop the skill further and I believe there are four practices any builder can do that will allow you to think for yourself more than you ever have in your life and if I had to sum up these four practices simply what I would tell you to do is act more like a child.

I believe every child is an independent thinker and I believe we mimic the actions of children we ourselves can unlearn the conventional thinking that has been thrust upon us through schooling work and other life experiences so here are the four practices the first is to ask why a ton by asking the word why you aim to understand rather than just accepting.

It is such a high leverage word by asking it you open yourself to finding truth when so many others have just accepted the thing that you are questioning to be true I literally do this practice with anything in life from asking why we're doing something a certain way with our business to literally this morning asking myself why shorts still have draw strings on them if most people don't actually tie their shorts it's a ridiculous example but to me it builds momentum

around constant questioning why is also a great way to understand if the person you're talking to is independent and thought if they share a deeply held belief with you each time you ask why forces them to peel back another layer of the onion and show how much merit there is to their belief.

So let's just use an example let's say someone says to me electric vehicles are the future of transportation.

If I start by asking them why why is that the case why is that true that electric vehicles are the future of transportation I may get an answer like you know climate change is real and the importance of sustainability will only grow in acceptance.

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