Are you thinking for yourself?

Hey :)

There’s something that worries me about how quickly we default to other people’s ideas.

A client has a problem.

We immediately go and buy the books.
Download the podcast episodes.
Search for frameworks.

And just to be clear — I love books. I’m in the middle of a couple right now because I’ve got some fairly serious challenges ahead of me in specific areas. It would be stupid not to go and learn from people who’ve already wrestled with those problems.

But that’s only part of it.

What I’m trying to articulate (and I’m not sure I’ve nailed this yet) is that there’s a middle step that I think a lot of us skip.

We go from:

Problem → Other people’s ideas → Application

But what’s missing is:

Problem → Other people’s ideas → Thinking → Application

That “thinking” bit in the middle is the work.

It’s the bridge.

It’s the filter.

I was talking about this with my friend Scott.

Side note: I think it’s incredibly important to have at least one person you can talk your ideas through with. Not a big mastermind. Not a crowd. Just one person who challenges how you think and forces you to sharpen your ideas. That alone improves the quality of your thinking.

Anyway — what I notice is that it’s very easy to start leaning too heavily on other people’s notebooks.

Seneca wrote something along the lines of: how long will you stay in other people’s work? When will you turn these words into works of your own?

That’s stuck with me for years.

And actually, as I was rereading this before publishing it, I randomly thought about that scene in Good Will Hunting — the famous bar scene. The “how do you like them apples?” moment. Matt Damon’s character calls out the Harvard guy for basically parroting a historian’s work to sound intelligent, and he says, “Were you just going to plagiarise the whole thing or did you have any thoughts of your own on the matter?” It’s funny, but it’s also kind of the point. You can read everything. You can quote everything. You can sound smart. But at some stage the question becomes: what do you think?

Again, this isn’t anti-learning. If I’m studying strategy, I’ll go find the best books on strategy. Of course I will. But I’m not trying to lift someone else’s framework wholesale and drop it into my business or my client’s business.

I’m trying to understand it.

Then I’m trying to sit with it.

Then I’m trying to ask: what part of this actually applies to my specific problem set?

Then I’m trying to shape it into something that makes sense in my world.

It’s like taking five existing ideas and turning them into a sixth one — something that fits your context, your experience, your judgement.

That part takes effort.

And I think what worries me is when other people’s ideas become a crutch.

When the default solution to any problem is: go and find someone else’s answer.

Because if you do that too quickly:

You don’t build trust in your own thinking.
You don’t develop confidence in your own judgement.
You slow down your ability to generate insight.
You never really create your own methods.
You don’t build on what’s already been done — you just reuse it.

There’s no evolution.

Especially if you’re a coach, consultant, or business owner. Your job isn’t to recite what the books say. Your job is to digest what the books say, test it, wrestle with it, adapt it, and turn it into something that actually works in the messy reality of your clients’ lives.

That requires thinking.

It requires sitting with uncertainty for a bit longer before outsourcing the answer.

And again — this is a both/and situation.

Learn aggressively.
Read widely.
Study the best.

But don’t let that replace your own processing.

At some point you have to close the book and ask: