November 2020There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinkingdifferently from your peers. To be a successful scientist, forexample, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to beboth correct and novel. You can't publish papers saying things otherpeople already know. You need to say things no one else has realizedyet.The same is true for investors. It's not enough for a public marketinvestor to predict correctly how a company will do. If a lot ofother people make the same prediction, the stock price will alreadyreflect it, and there's no room to make money. The only valuableinsights are the ones most other investors don't share.You see this pattern with startup founders too. You don't want tostart a startup to do something that everyone agrees is a good idea,or there will already be other companies doing it. You have to dosomething that sounds to most other people like a bad idea, butthat you know isn't — like writing software for a tiny computerused by a few thousand hobbyists, or starting a site to let peoplerent airbeds on strangers' floors.Ditto for essayists. An essay that told people things they alreadyknew would be boring. You have to tell them something new.But this pattern isn't universal. In fact, it doesn't hold for mostkinds of work. In most kinds of work — to be an administrator, forexample — all you need is the first half. All you need is to beright. It's not essential that everyone else be wrong.There's room for a little novelty in most kinds of work, but inpractice there's a fairly sharp distinction between the kinds ofwork where it's essential to be independent-minded, and the kindswhere it's not.I wish someone had told me about this distinction when I was a kid,because it's one of the most important things to think about whenyou're deciding what kind of work you want to do. Do you want todo the kind of work where you can only win by thinking differentlyfrom everyone else? I suspect most people's unconscious mind willanswer that question before their conscious mind has a chance to.I know mine does.Independent-mindedness seems to be more a matter of nature thannurture. Which means if you pick the wrong type of work, you'regoing to be unhappy. If you're naturally independent-minded, you'regoing to find it frustrating to be a middle manager. And if you'renaturally conventional-minded, you're going to be sailing into aheadwind if you try to do original research.One difficulty here, though, is that people are often mistaken aboutwhere they fall on the spectrum from conventional- to independent-minded.Conventional-minded people don't like to think of themselves asconventional-minded. And in any case, it genuinely feels to themas if they make up their own minds about everything. It's just acoincidence that their beliefs are identical to their peers'. Andthe independent-minded, meanwhile, are often unaware how differenttheir ideas are from conventional ones, at least till they statethem publicly.[1]By the time they reach adulthood, most people know roughly how smartthey are (in the narrow sense of ability to solve pre-set problems),because they're constantly being tested and ranked according to it.But schools generally ignore independent-mindedness, except to theextent they try to suppress it. So we don't get anything like thesame kind of feedback about how independent-minded we are.There may even be a phenomenon like Dunning-Kruger at work, wherethe most conventional-minded people are confident that they'reindependent-minded, while the genuinely independent-minded worrythey might not be independent-minded enough.Can you make yourself more independent-minded? I think so. Thisquality may be largely inborn, but there seem to be ways to magnifyit, or at least not to suppress it.One of the most effective techniques is one practiced unintentionallyby most nerds: simply to be less aware what conventional beliefsare. It's hard to be a conformist if you don't know what you'resupposed to conform to. Though again, it may be that such peoplealready are independent-minded. A conventional-minded person wouldprobably feel anxious not knowing what other people thought, andmake more effort to find out.It matters a lot who you surround yourself with. If you're surroundedby conventional-minded people, it will constrain which ideas youcan express, and that in turn will constrain which ideas you have.But if you surround yourself with independent-minded people, you'llhave the opposite experience: hearing other people say surprisingthings will encourage you to, and to think of more.Because the independent-minded find it uncomfortable to be surroundedby conventional-minded people, they tend to self-segregate oncethey have a chance to. The problem with high school is that theyhaven't yet had a chance to. Plus high school tends to be aninward-looking little world whose inhabitants lack confidence, bothof which magnify the forces of conformism. So high school isoften a bad time for theindependent-minded. But there is some advantage even here: itteaches you what to avoid. If you later find yourself in a situationthat makes you think "this is like high school," you know you shouldget out.[2]Another place where the independent- and conventional-minded arethrown together is in successful startups. The founders and earlyemployees are almost always independent-minded; otherwise the startupwouldn't be successful. But conventional-minded people greatlyoutnumber independent-minded ones, so as the company grows, theoriginal spirit of independent-mindedness is inevitably diluted.This causes all kinds of problems besides the obvious one that thecompany starts to suck. One of the strangest is that the foundersfind themselves able to speak more freely with founders of othercompanies than with their own employees.[3]Fortunately you don't have to spend all your time with independent-mindedpeople. It's enough to have one or two you can talk to regularly.And once you find them, they're usually as eager to talk as youare; they need you too. Although universities no longer have thekind of monopoly they used to have on education, good universitiesare still an excellent way to meet independent-minded people. Moststudents will still be conventional-minded, but you'll at leastfind clumps of independent-minded ones, rather than the near zeroyou may have found in high school.It also works to go in the other direction: as well as cultivatinga small collection of independent-minded friends, to try to meetas many different types of people as you can. It will decrease theinfluence of your immediate peers if you have several other groupsof peers. Plus if you're part of several different worlds, you canoften import ideas from one to another.But by different types of people, I don't mean demographicallydifferent. For this technique to work, they have to think differently.So while it's an excellent idea to go and visit other countries,you can probably find people who think differently right around thecorner. When I meet someone who knows a lot about something unusual(which includes practically everyone, if you dig deep enough), Itry to learn what they know that other people don't. There arealmost always surprises here. It's a good way to make conversationwhen you meet strangers, but I don't do it to make conversation.I really want to know.You can expand the source of influences in time as well as space,by reading history. When I read history I do it not just to learnwhat happened, but to try to get inside the heads of people wholived in the past. How did things look to them? This is hard to do,but worth the effort for the same reason it's worth travelling farto triangulate a point.You can also take more explicit measures to prevent yourself fromautomatically adopting conventional opinions. The most general isto cultivate an attitude of skepticism. When you hear someone saysomething, stop and ask yourself "Is that true?" Don't say it outloud. I'm not suggesting that you impose on everyone who talks toyou the burden of proving what they say, but rather that you takeupon yourself the burden of evaluating what they say.Treat it as a puzzle. You know that some accepted ideas will laterturn out to be wrong. See if you can guess which. The end goal isnot to find flaws in the things you're told, but to find the newideas that had been concealed by the broken ones. So this gameshould be an exciting quest for novelty, not a boring protocol forintellectual hygiene. And you'll be surprised, when you start asking"Is this true?", how often the answer is not an immediate yes. Ifyou have any imagination, you're more likely to have too many leadsto follow than too few.More generally your goal should be not to let anything into yourhead unexamined, and things don't always enter your head in theform of statements. Some of the most powerful influences are implicit.How do you even notice these? By standing back and watching howother people get their ideas.When you stand back at a sufficient distance, you can see ideasspreading through groups of people like waves. The most obvious arein fashion: you notice a few people wearing a certain kind of shirt,and then more and more, until half the people around you are wearingthe same shirt. You may not care much what you wear, but there areintellectual fashions too, and you definitely don't want to participatein those. Not just because you want sovereignty over your ownthoughts, but because unfashionableideas are disproportionately likely to lead somewhere interesting.The best place to find undiscovered ideas is where no one else islooking.[4]To go beyond this general advice, we need to look at the internalstructure of independent-mindedness — at the individual muscleswe need to exercise, as it were. It seems to me that it has threecomponents: fastidiousness about truth, resistance to being toldwhat to think, and curiosity.Fastidiousness about truth means more than just not believing thingsthat are false. It means being careful about degree of belief. Formost people, degree of belief rushes unexamined toward the extremes:the unlikely becomes impossible, and the probable becomes certain.[5]To the independent-minded, this seems unpardonably sloppy.They're willing to have anything in their heads, from highlyspeculative hypotheses to (apparent) tautologies, but on subjectsthey care about, everything has to be labelled with a carefullyconsidered degree of belief.[6]The independent-minded thus have a horror of ideologies, whichrequire one to accept a whole collection of beliefs at once, andto treat them as articles of faith. To an independent-minded personthat would seem revolting, just as it would seem to someone fastidiousabout food to take a bite of a submarine sandwich filled with alarge variety of ingredients of indeterminate age and provenance.Without this fastidiousness about truth, you can't be trulyindependent-minded. It's not enough just to have resistance to beingtold what to think. Those kind of people reject conventional ideasonly to replace them with the most random conspiracy theories. Andsince these conspiracy theories have often been manufactured tocapture them, they end up being less independent-minded than ordinarypeople, because they're subject to a much more exacting master thanmere convention.[7]Can you increase your fastidiousness about truth? I would think so.In my experience, merely thinking about something you're fastidiousabout causes that fastidiousness to grow. If so, this is one ofthose rare virtues we can have more of merely by wanting it. Andif it's like other forms of fastidiousness, it should also bepossible to encourage in children. I certainly got a strong doseof it from my father.[8]The second component of independent-mindedness, resistance to beingtold what to think, is the most visible of the three. But even thisis often misunderstood. The big mistake people make about it is tothink of it as a merely negative quality. The language we usereinforces that idea. You're unconventional. You don't carewhat other people think. But it's not just a kind of immunity. Inthe most independent-minded people, the desire not to be told whatto think is a positive force. It's not mere skepticism, but anactive delight in ideas that subvertthe conventional wisdom, the more counterintuitive the better.Some of the most novel ideas seemed at the time almost like practicaljokes. Think how often your reaction to a novel idea is to laugh.I don't think it's because novel ideas are funny per se, but becausenovelty and humor share a certain kind of surprisingness. But whilenot identical, the two are close enough that there is a definitecorrelation between having a sense of humor and being independent-minded— just as there is between being humorless and being conventional-minded.[9]I don't think we can significantly increase our resistance to beingtold what to think. It seems the most innate of the three componentsof independent-mindedness; people who have this quality as adultsusually showed all too visible signs of it as children. But if wecan't increase our resistance to being told what to think, we canat least shore it up, by surrounding ourselves with otherindependent-minded people.The third component of independent-mindedness, curiosity, may bethe most interesting. To the extent that we can give a brief answerto the question of where novel ideas come from, it's curiosity. That'swhat people are usually feeling before having them.In my experience, independent-mindedness and curiosity predict oneanother perfectly. Everyone I know who's independent-minded isdeeply curious, and everyone I know who's conventional-minded isn't.Except, curiously, children. All small children are curious. Perhapsthe reason is that even the conventional-minded have to be curiousin the beginning, in order to learn what the conventions are. Whereasthe independent-minded are the gluttons of curiosity, who keepeating even after they're full.[10]The three components of independent-mindedness work in concert:fastidiousness about truth and resistance to being told what tothink leave space in your brain, and curiosity finds new ideas tofill it.Interestingly, the three components can substitute for one anotherin much the same way muscles can. If you're sufficiently fastidiousabout truth, you don't need to be as resistant to being told whatto think, because fastidiousness alone will create sufficient gapsin your knowledge. And either one can compensate for curiosity,because if you create enough space in your brain, your discomfortat the resulting vacuum will add force to your curiosity. Or curiositycan compensate for them: if you're sufficiently curious, you don'tneed to clear space in your brain, because the new ideas you discoverwill push out the conventional ones you acquired by default.Because the components of independent-mindedness are so interchangeable,you can have them to varying degrees and still get the same result.So there is not just a single model of independent-mindedness. Someindependent-minded people are openly subversive, and others arequietly curious. They all know the secret handshake though.Is there a way to cultivate curiosity? To start with, you want toavoid situations that suppress it. How much does the work you'recurrently doing engage your curiosity? If the answer is "not much,"maybe you should change something.The most important active step you can take to cultivate yourcuriosity is probably to seek out the topics that engage it. Fewadults are equally curious about everything, and it doesn't seemas if you can choose which topics interest you. So it's up to youto find them. Or invent them, ifnecessary.Another way to increase your curiosity is to indulge it, byinvestigating things you're interested in. Curiosity is unlikemost other appetites in this respect: indulging it tends to increaserather than to sate it. Questions lead to more questions.Curiosity seems to be more individual than fastidiousness abouttruth or resistance to being told what to think. To the degreepeople have the latter two, they're usually pretty general, whereasdifferent people can be curious about very different things. Soperhaps curiosity is the compass here. Perhaps, if your goal is todiscover novel ideas, your motto should not be "do what you love"so much as "do what you're curious about."Notes[1]One convenient consequence of the fact that no one identifiesas conventional-minded is that you can say what you like aboutconventional-minded people without getting in too much trouble.When I wrote "The Four Quadrants ofConformism" I expected a firestorm of rage from theaggressively conventional-minded, but in fact it was quite muted.They sensed that there was something about the essay that theydisliked intensely, but they had a hard time finding a specificpassage to pin it on.[2]When I ask myself what in my life is like high school, theanswer is Twitter. It's not just full of conventional-minded people,as anything its size will inevitably be, but subject to violentstorms of conventional-mindedness that remind me of descriptionsof Jupiter. But while it probably is a net loss to spend time there,it has at least made me think more about the distinction betweenindependent- and conventional-mindedness, which I probably wouldn'thave done otherwise.[3]The decrease in independent-mindedness in growing startups isstill an open problem, but there may be solutions.Founders can delay the problem by making a conscious effort onlyto hire independent-minded people. Which of course also has theancillary benefit that they have better ideas.Another possible solution is to create policies that somehow disruptthe force of conformism, much as control rods slow chain reactions,so that the conventional-minded aren't as dangerous. The physicalseparation of Lockheed's Skunk Works may have had this as a sidebenefit. Recent examples suggest employee forums like Slack may notbe an unmitigated good.The most radical solution would be to grow revenues without growingthe company. You think hiring that junior PR person will be cheap,compared to a programmer, but what will be the effect on the averagelevel of independent-mindedness in your company? (The growth instaff relative to faculty seems to have had a similar effect onuniversities.) Perhaps the rule about outsourcing work that's notyour "core competency" should be augmented by one about outsourcingwork done by people who'd ruin your culture as employees.Some investment firms already seem to be able to grow revenueswithout growing the number of employees. Automation plus the everincreasing articulation of the "tech stack" suggest this may oneday be possible for product companies.[4]There are intellectual fashions in every field, but theirinfluence varies. One of the reasons politics, for example, tendsto be boring is that it's so extremely subject to them. The thresholdfor having opinions about politics is much lower than the one for havingopinions about set theory. So while there are some ideas in politics,in practice they tend to be swamped by waves of intellectual fashion.[5]The conventional-minded are often fooled by the strength oftheir opinions into believing that they're independent-minded. Butstrong convictions are not a sign of independent-mindedness. Ratherthe opposite.[6]Fastidiousness about truth doesn't imply that an independent-mindedperson won't be dishonest, but that he won't be deluded. It's sortof like the definition of a gentleman as someone who is neverunintentionally rude.[7]You see this especially among political extremists. They thinkthemselves nonconformists, but actually they're niche conformists.Their opinions may be different from the average person's, but theyare often more influenced by their peers' opinions than the averageperson's are.[8]If we broaden the concept of fastidiousness about truth so thatit excludes pandering, bogusness, and pomposity as well as falsehoodin the strict sense, our model of independent-mindedness can expandfurther into the arts.[9]This correlation is far from perfect, though. Gödel and Diracdon't seem to have been very strong in the humor department. Butsomeone who is both "neurotypical" and humorless is very likely tobe conventional-minded.[10]Exception: gossip. Almost everyone is curious about gossip.Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison, JessicaLivingston, Robert Morris, Harj Taggar, and Peter Thiel for readingdrafts of this.
