Almostgotit.com

Many years ago, a very tall man and I went on our first date.  After watching East of Eden in the campus auditorium, we went back to my dorm room, made popcorn, and talked. 

One of the things my new friend mentioned was an article he’d just read in the Atlantic Monthly called “The Size of Thoughts,” by Nicholson Baker.  It begins like this:

Each thought has a size, and most are about three feet tall, with the level of complexity of a lawnmower engine, or a cigarette lighter, or those tubes of toothpaste that, by mingling several hidden pastes and gels, create a pleasantly striped product. Once in a while, a thought may come up that seems, in its woolly, ranked composure, roughly the size of one’s hall closet. But a really large thought, a thought in the presence of which whole urban centers would rise to their feet, and cry out with expressions of gratefulness and kinship; a thought with grandeur, and drenching, barrel-scorning cataracts, and detonations of fist-clenched hope, and hundreds of cellos; a thought that can tear phone books in half, and rap on the iron nodes of experience until every blue girder rings; a thought that may one day pack everything noble and good into its briefcase, elbow past the curators of purposelessness, travel overnight toward Truth, and shake it by the indifferent marble shoulders until it finally whispers its cool assent—this is the size of thought worth thinking about.

Really large thoughts.  That’s what we talked about, and then he went home, and I couldn’t get to sleep that night because something huge had just happened, I could tell. 

Two years later, I married him.

A few years after that, with our children, I had cause to revisit an old friend, the illustrious Dr. Seuss.  Who wrote, of course  “Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!”

Sometimes, I channel Seuss, like this:

Maybe it matters, though,
Matters a lot.
Whether we don’t, or we do
have a thought.
It might make you rich -
But then it might not.
It might make no difference
or might make a lot.
It might be the kind
that gets in the way,
but it also might lead to
your future, that day.
            * * *

Mr. Baker makes the best point of all about the importance of thoughts, though, so my final words must be his:

Would it be possible to list those features that, taken together, confer upon a thought a lofty magnificence? What makes them so very large? My idle corollary hope is that perhaps a systematic and rigorous codification, on the model of Hammurabi’s or Napoleon’s, might make large thoughts available cheap, and in bulk, to the general public, thereby salvaging the 19th-century dream of a liberal democracy.

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Related Posts:
In defense of thoughts (part 1)
To have as many thoughts as possible (part 2)
The size of thoughts (part 3)

Maybe Jim Fannin is just being hyperbolic when he suggests that switching our brains to “off” is the only way we can succeed (”wildly”) at business.

If so, then I suppose the next thing to do is to decide how damaging “thought” really is, not just to those trying to start their own businesses, but to the rest of us (almost) working stiffs, as well. 

Of course it is bad to obsess over non-essentials; cogitate over unchangable things in our past; or worry about things over which we have no control.

But is “thought” itself really such a barrier to action, 99.99% of the time, as Fannin suggests?  After all, in the previous century, Sigmund Freud wrote that “thought is action in rehearsal.” And a few hundred years before Freud was born, Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus  opined that “thoughts create a new heaven, a new firmament, a new source of energy, from which new arts flow.”    Mr. Paracelsus was considered inflammatory in his own time, too.  He tended to reject the traditional theories of his learned colleagues, and preferred to write in everyday German instead of in snooty Latin like the rest of them.   

I like this guy.

Annie Besant, the 19th century  women’s rights activist,  writer and orator believed “thought creates character.”  Her priest told her that she had read too many books.  And suggested she shut up.

Fortunately, she ignored him. 

A few years later, James Allen wrote the classic self-help book, As a Man Thinketh, which you can download here for free.  Allen believed that “right thoughts and right efforts will inevitably bring about right results,” and  “you are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you.”  

Some credit James Allen’s book with making many other men into millionaires.

Henry Ford said that “thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason so few engage in it,” and Henry Ford didn’t do half badly at either starting a business or making a living, did he? 

Therefore, I submit that going on a “thought diet” is not the best way to assure a succesful career.  But even if it is the best way, I’m not going to do it. 

It was another old dead guy, Montaigne, who wrote: “The pleasantest things in the world are pleasant thoughts: and the great art of life is to have as many of them as possible.”

————
Related Posts:
In defense of thoughts (part 1)
To have as many thoughts as possible (part 2)
The size of thoughts (part 3)

For days now, I’ve been reflecting on something that appeared in one of Penelope Trunk’s recent columns. 

It seems that Trunk spoke to success coach Jim Fannin, who told her “that research has shown that wildly successful people have 1,000 fewer thoughts a day than others, which allows the successful people to have exceptional focus on their goals.”

Well now.  That certainly provides some real food for… well, something in which I’ve been overindulging, apparently.  But I can’t help myself.  You see:  I really LIKE having thoughts.

I was relieved to find out I’m not the only career-minded person who has this strange proclivity.  Maureen Rogers  wrote, in her own marvelous comment at the end of Trunk’s column:

I’m with AlmostGotIt. I LIKE having thoughts, too. After thinking about it, I’ve come to the realization that those of us who are introspective; who really, truly, like to think about things; who are highly analytical are probably just not all that cut out to be risk-taking entrepreneurs. To succeed in an entrepreneurial endeavor, you need to have supreme conviction - and thinkers tend to spend perhaps too much time evaluating risk, playing “what-if”, etc.. A better job for us: chief of staff, advisor to the throne, internal consultant….

“Advisor to the throne.”  I definitely pick that one.   (You know: for now, I mean.)

But perhaps the problem here is that I don’t have the right qualifications to have thoughts.  This possibility has been brought up before. 

At The Institution Which Shall Not Be Named (to pick an example at wild random) there is only a very small allotment allowed for thinkers, and these slots are all taken by highly-trained Thinkologists.   Many of those who have gone through the entire formation process of Thinkology are surprisingly intelligent, diversity-promoting, even iconoclastic thinkers.  However, their thoughts still must be chosen from the approved intelligent,-diversity-promoting,-even-iconoclastic LIST.

Which, needless to say, is entirely unavailable to inflammatory non-thinkologists such as myself.

I decided that Jim Fannin might be onto something.

So I visited his website.  I was glad to find that he has an online quiz,  which of course I took immediately to see if I “[Don’t] Think Like A Champion.”   Here is what I found out:

The results indicate your S.C.O.R.E. Level is dangerously low. You are not in the game. If this score persists either change your goal or approach it in a completely different way. You are on the wrong path.

Wow, this is bad. 

Fortunately, Fannin has a number of products which could help put me back IN the game. Unfortunately, unlike many of his other clients, I don’t have a professional baseballer’s salary to pay for any of them.

But perhaps I can offer him some small repayment-in-kind, at least.  Bob Sutton, a professor at the prestigious Harvard Business School, has developed another little online quiz which, I humbly submit, may be just the thing.

——-

Related Posts:
In defense of thoughts (part 1)
To have as many thoughts as possible (part 2)
The size of thoughts (part 3)