Don't outsource your thinking

Seeking knowledge, and expanding our understanding of reality is a wonderful thing. Reading books, blogs, essays, research papers. Knowledge is exciting, and gaining a new perspective can leave me wonderstruck from minutes to days.

I’ve come to realize that this abundance of information can have a peculiar effect.

We savor the books we read, admiring their authors, and we look up to the writers of the blogs we wander in. The more we learn, the more aware we become of our own ignorance, and the more we are prone to doubting ourselves. This can make us weigh external ideas and information more than thoughts in our own brain. We sometimes even end up relying on them, bypassing our own thinking entirely.

We search for answers to subjective questions.

“Should I change job?”

“How to be happy?”

Answers to such questions should come from within, yet we often give in to laziness and outsource our thinking to those we admire. But we already posses enough knowledge — the answer is within our reach.

We just need to sit and think, structure the mess in our brain, and act.

Oftentimes, the answers that come out of this are stupidly simple. They feel obvious, as if we had known the solution all along.