Consuming content daily is one of the most important things to keep an active and productive mind. By exposing yourself to new information every day, you challenge yourself to think outside the normal monotony and daily routines of life. Whether it’s reading part of a book, listening to a podcast, reading an article, or watching a video, putting new ideas into your mind will drastically improve your creative thinking and make you a much more effective value creator.
While this is something that I already try to implement in my day-to-day life, I have decided to make it a more serious commitment. Every day this month, I am going to be consuming a piece of content and doing both a short write-up about it and a short video explaining my takeaways.
It won’t be anything crazy, but it will be a good exercise for me to look at ideas with an open mind and a philosophizing imagination. It will then allow you to look at my thoughts on the subjects and come to your own conclusions based on both the content and my thoughts.
I’m excited for this month of learning new ideas, and I hope you will engage in the material as we go through it each day.
Today’s piece of content is an article by Jason Fried called “Give it five minutes.”
In the article, Fried hits hard on the reactionary mindset of disagreeing with an idea before fully letting it marinate in your mind. Having a knee-jerk reaction to something and acting/speaking on it immediately.
He give a personal example of this when he was a speaker at a conference and after his presentation, another speaker (Richard Saul Wurman) came to him and complimented him on his talk. Fried, instead of repaying Wurman with compliments, pushed back on what he had heard Wurman talk on earlier. He had taken notes on what he disagreed with, so now that he was able to talk to him, he brought his disagreements up. Here’s what Fried says about the interaction:
“His response changed my life. It was a simple thing. He said “Man, give it five minutes.” I asked him what he meant by that? He said, it’s fine to disagree, it’s fine to push back, it’s great to have strong opinions and beliefs, but give my ideas some time to set in before you’re sure you want to argue against them. “Five minutes” represented “think”, not react.”
I think of this like some gun laws. The “cooling off” laws. Where to buy a gun, you have to wait a couple days to get the gun. They have done studies that have shown how this decreases suicide rates. When people have time to actually think and not just react to something, often times they end up making a different decision than they were going to initially.
The reverse of this is what you often see in debates. One person starts talking, and within the first 5 seconds, the other person already knows what they’re going to talk about. They basically stop listening to what the other person is saying because they want to think about their point and what they believe. They pay no attention to whether what this person is saying is something they might actually share some belief with.
In my own life, I have noticed I do this when visiting other churches. When I’m away from home, I often like to visit churches where I am visiting, and I often go in trying to find things I disagree with. Anything that they do wrong. This severely limits what I can learn because I go into everything as a skeptic, not a learner.
This goes back to the advice I’ve mentioned before. Chew the meat, spit out the bones.
You’ve got to be able to take everything in and truly let it marinate. Think about it. Sometimes your initial negative reaction to something is based only on partial pre-conceived problems.
Dig deep. Challenge yourself to find what you agree with before you find what you disagree with.
You’ll be amazed at how much you can learn from the people around you.