The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

 

This thing happened so many times and I could not put my finger on it. How come I decide on something without thinking? Was that acting on an impulse? He claims we make stuff up when making decisions in a moment. 

Maybe that is true for trivial things like why I prefer Coke. But when it comes to more serious things, in my opinion, it is a product of days of thinking, and research, then you leave it alone for quite some time, and then one day you just do it or not. And turns out the decision was right. How to explain that the decision was the right one? Probably by the fact that the brain does not rest. It keeps on connecting the dots in the foreground.

So basically, it is not thinking without thinking. He is talking about subjective impressions of individuals and that they come from our subconscious. He is probably trying to say how we chose why we like Coke or Pepsi better. It is all highly subjective, predicated on all sorts of elements, premises, research, thinking, non-thinking, etc, and basically how we lie to ourselves when we base our choice on preference. He says there is a danger in taking a snap judgment at face value. And yet we all face that when we have to choose between different products, let`s say when we go to a supermarket. If I understood him rightly.

I am talking about making snap judgments in life. A totally different thing. This lecture is making me think beyond what he is stating here. I am not arguing he is wrong or right, but simply going further and drawing conclusions from my experience.

Once a colleague asked me if I had a certain document in one of my files. She asked me to go through a search and see if I could find it while saying that she might have it somewhere on her computer, but wasn`t in the position to look for it. 

For some reason, my immediate judgment was to not do anything. So for some irrational reason, I didn`t. I followed that intuition telling me to not do anything. Since it was not like me to not do anything when a fellow person asks for my help, in general. So my inner reaction, caused by this intuitive thinking, made me conclude that I was an awful person for not acting on her wish. Probably that way of thinking was engraved by DNA and was learned in the family. 

Turns out, months later, (I definitely forgot about that totally) that she finally found it in one of her files. So there you go. My instinct/intuition was telling me not to lift a finger, which I did not and as a consequence felt terrible about it. But I learned a valuable lesson. Sometimes a snap judgment comes from some weird logic that you do not understand and it comes to your rescue. Like a hero coming out ex machina. Maybe my thought process was going along the lines of, "Why should I waste my time trying to find something that she is probably either lazy to do herself or she had not even tried, or she is swamped with work". I was definitely trying to find a rational explanation, but nothing to my satisfaction.

So my intuition was correct even if it worked on a very dubious logic. Even dubious, it was correct. This thing happened again and again later on in life, and it could not get passed by me unnoticed because it was very unlike me and a very unusual phenomenon. So I had no choice but to start trusting my intuition. Turns out, it does not fail me, and after all, as a result, I am not a terrible person. It is as if my subconscious was telling me, "stop having that Mother Theresa syndrome". You can`t help everyone, especially those who are not crippled and possess all the faculties. Stop handing things to them on a plate. They can do and figure out stuff on their own. A valuable lesson for me.

Another takeaway for me was that intuition can also help in decerning whom to help and whom not to help. It seems it works in conjunction with rational thinking and logic.  That`s some powerful combo.