But this is a clear fallacy. Think for a moment about one of your ‘major’ problems. Try to visualize it in all its ugly details. Now try to think of possible solutions. No matter how hard you think, chances are you won’t come to any feasible solution. In fact, the more you think, the greater the probability that you will either feel a little depressed at your apparent helplessness, or you will start getting a tad anxious, as you cook up endless ‘what if’ scenarios: What if your best friend you quarreled with yesterday never speaks to you again? What if that little mole at the back of your head turns out to be cancerous? What if you didn’t get that much-deserved promotion after years of waiting in the wings?[break]
In this ‘information age,’ more often than not, thinking is the problem, not the solution. In his bestselling book The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle emphasizes the importance of being able to stop our incessant stream of thoughts if we are to live happy and meaningful lives. Thinking, in Tolle’s view, involves ruminating about either the past or the future, either of which is a futile exercise. Only by learning to live in the ‘now’ can we fulfill the true purpose of our lives.
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It is not just spiritual gurus like Tolle who emphasize the need to control our thoughts that have a tendency of running away when they are not monitored. Writing in More Intelligent Life, sports writer Ian Leslie offers scientific proof of the pitfalls of over-thinking. “If a rat is faced with a puzzle in which food is placed on its left 60% of the time and on the right 40% of the time, it will quickly deduce that the left side is more rewarding, and head there every time, thus achieving a 60% success rate. Young children adopt the same strategy. When Yale undergraduates [or grownups like you and I] play the game, they try to figure out some underlying pattern, and end up doing worse than the rat or the child.” The lesson? “We really can be too clever for our own good.”
People who rely on their gut instincts over their ‘rational thoughts’ invariably do better in their personal and professional lives as compared to those who have it the other way around. Unsurprisingly, risk taking, which involves a leap of faith, a temporary suspension of rational thinking, is one of the biggest predictors of success. Who would have thought that a ragtag band of rebels with virtually no weapons to speak of would one day overturn the centuries-old state structure in Nepal? Messrs Dahal, Bhattarai & Co took the plunge and have now emerged the biggest democratically elected political party in the country. The biggest business successes are big risk takers too: be it Bill Gates who quit Harvard to found Microsoft or Fred Smith, the man behind FedEx, the first (and now the largest) overnight express delivery company in the world.
In the famous anecdote, Smith received a “C” on his college paper where he laid out his idea for a reliable overnight delivery service. His professor at Yale is reported to have told him, “… the concept is interesting and well formed, but in order to earn better than a “C” grade, your ideas also have to be feasible.”
The over-thinking Yale professor is cut from the same cloth as most of us. Even before we start something, we tend to get bogged down by conjuring up nonexistent hurdles on the road. And the more we think about them, the harder they seem to surmount. We are afraid to take even reasonable risks, too timid to follow our gut instinct, too preoccupied with our ‘past’ and ‘future,’ and utterly incapable of living in the here and now.
I will never forget a dare in my MBA induction class. In front of the class was a box marked “Do you dare?” To be eligible for a prize, the person who volunteered to open the box had to perform a dare outlined on a slip of paper inside the box, whatever it was. When the instructor asked if anybody felt up to the challenge, a young woman at the front thrust her hand up, as if by instinct. She walked up to the box and tore it open. Inside, there was a slip instructing her to collect her prize. She had won because she had dared.
Knowing that we tend to over-think is the easy part. Learning to suspend our thinking and accepting the challenge of living in the now is the hard bit.
The writer is the op-ed editor at Republica.
biswas.baral@gmail.com
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