life

Meaning-Making: Finishing My Thoughts

“confronting a hard truth”

How are you different now than you were three years ago?

I was recently asked this question and drew a blank. Like, a hard blank. Think, Declan, think. Yes, this was a high-pressure situation and my answer was going to be analyzed to determine whether it was a good answer and also enough of a “right” answer. Although there is no singular right answer, or any truly wrong answers, there are certainly answers that wouldn’t fit. Since I hadn’t asked myself this question before, I tried to piece one together that fit. (spoiler: it didn’t) 1

It bothered me that I didn’t have a crystal clear answer. I sunk deeper into my chair. It bothered me after the conversation ended and, even while walking outside with fresh air, I was still devoid of an answer. It was a bit of an ego hit because I’ve always considered myself a deep thinker and a reflective person. Is this no longer the case? How? Is my mindless job degrading my ability to do so? Has the infinity pool doom scrolling finally caught up? Is it something to do with pharmacology? Could it be that I’ve been eating in a surplus this week and therefore devoting too much energy to digestion? What if I was standing and could move slightly, would the answer have come to me then? Was I just too anxious because of the person on the other end of the answer? Is my brain fried?

Perhaps, it’s much simpler: I never truly thought about it before. 2

What?! I think alllllll the time. I think and think and unfortunately I overthink, too. I think so much that I tell myself I need to think less and do more. I certainly think about myself. I think about who I am, who I could be, and what I should’ve done. So, how do I not know what has changed in the past three years if so much of what I do is think?

Because I’m not finishing my thoughts. I’m thinking a lot of them (over a thousand notes in my Apple notes!) but I’m not putting in the effort to truly understand what they mean. I think I might just be doom scrolling my own internal feed of short-form thoughts, not stopping to turn any one into a cinematic masterpiece meant for the big screen. 3

So now I’m wondering what’s the true cause of me drawing a blank to that question: Have I never thought of that particular question before or am I not finishing any of my thoughts? The former is a question of personal reflection, but I’m not quite sure the latter — is it laziness? carelessness? inability to focus?

Accepting the simple explanation would be a dismissal of all the other possible explanations for why this might be - phrased another way, it’d be a dismissal of all the excuses. Although not Occam’s original interpretation, his razor cuts through the comforting explanations to reveal that what I might actually just need is focused effort.

Let’s consider the opposite. Let’s say I was finishing my thoughts. What would I be doing? I’d be talking clearly and with purpose. I’d be calling upon not just past thoughts, but past learnings. There’d be less “that’s crazy” and more “so what”s. I would be assertive; giving assertions and taking ownership of my ideas and thoughts because I’ve considered why it would succeed or what risks and challenges would occur if it didn’t. It’d be a vote of confidence in myself.

Did you know that rumination is not the same thing as reflection? I didn’t quite know what rumination was either, but now I have a better understanding of both. Is it laziness, carelessness, inability to focus, lack of intelligence, or something else entirely that causes me to not remember “everyday” words or their meanings? Sometimes I draw blank on words during conversation. Words are hard, I say. I don’t want them to be hard forever. Rumination is a state of circling on the same thought without progress. It’s like running in circles, legs fueled with anxiety, trying to go further by speeding up. When one is ruminating, they’re reinforcing anxieties and falling victim to criticism as an imposter of analysis. Reflection, on the other hand, pulls you out of that loop. When you reflect, you find the patterns in your laps and turn them into something coherent you can apply elsewhere. Therefore, they take you elsewhere. The thoughts become useful. They take on meaning.

If I finished my thoughts, the self-critiquing ruminations would become reflections.

My thoughts are fleeting. I’ve got a fairly strong inner dialogue. Except when I don’t. Now that may sound dishonest — people speak in in generics when describing themselves as who they want to be, not who they actually are — but it’s more truth than fiction 4. This past Friday my thoughts were silent, lonely, and reminiscent of someone with no light in their eyes while the Friday before they looked like an episode of Tom & Jerry. That sounds quite dramatic, but I think the swings are as such. Would I have it any other way? I’m not sure because if that wasn’t the case then it would be somewhere in the middle and I’d never get to experience the serendipitous exploration of the period when it’s cranked to the fullest. I must find a way to finish those thoughts.

So far, there are 2400 words that have been loosely written, lightly discarded to the back of the brain, and slightly distracting from the main question of this investigation: why did I draw a blank on a reflective question?

According to the associate theory of creativity, creativity can be understood as associations made in the brain. New ideas are connections of associative relationships stored in memory. Some related, some unrelated. As I investigate this question, each thought that comes in gets addressed, then two hits on the ‘return’ key so it has room to breathe. In the end, I hope to tie them together to create my own, novel meaning. It’s only then that I will have finished my thoughts. I could choose to not finish the thoughts, but then I would be guilty of more short-form content with nothing to say for it when it matters. There’d be no masterpiece. I wonder if this is how some writers write. I can certainly imagine that to be the case. A briefcase that spills all over the sidewalk isn’t going to make sense, or be of much value, to the person walking by unless the ongoing work has been finished.

It’s evident that I struggle with finishing my thoughts because a majority of my blog posts thus far have been half-baked. I didn’t spend the time to think deeper, bring coherence, and make meaning out of the bullet points scattered across my digital footprint. Because that takes time. I’ve got stuff to do, right? I see now that’s exactly the type of thing I should do more now.

If Product has taught me anything, it’s that the best way to learn is by doing — by taking action towards what you’re trying to achieve (putting the thing out there and getting feedback). Stopping to reflect and think deeper is not an argument against that, it’s the same thing.

One next step is to do something I already knew I had to: write. The framing presented here, to finish my thoughts, is another angle or reason to write this blog. Seems a bit redundant. But I understand it better now. And that’s the whole purpose — to bring clarity to my thoughts. **Language is purposefully messy as there’s so much range and indeterminacy to human thought and emotion. It’s up to the writer to communicate their thoughts clearly. I will continue to write because my ability to articulately communicate and accurately express my ideas and achieve the things I want to will hinge on the ability to fully understand them myself. What good is intuition if I can’t communicate it to others? Equally, what good is it if I can’t communicate it to myself? Because I’ll need to draw on my own learnings to make new learnings. Associations. I can’t keep skimming the surface of my own buried treasures.

There’s a desire to write. An urge. I’ve always loved writing and so, in an answer to do the things that you love, I should write more. I certainly don’t do it enough. One of the reasons why I started this blog is because I enjoy it. **There are all these thoughts floating around and sometimes all you want to do is make sense of them. There’s a really, really cool feeling that you get from writing something that makes sense at the end; when finishing your thoughts bring meaning. That feels really good.

Now, it’s hard work. Hard work done repeatedly becomes easier. But it’s still hard. We must go through periods of physical discomfort while we mentally engage in learning something new. We want to avoid effort. It’s one of the reasons we aren’t inherently rational thinkers, as Kahneman would explain. And it’s also why we need to anticipate a period of discomfort at the onset of mental work, as Huberman would explain. We know that most good things require hard things.

I feel a pressure to put things out there as fast as I can (which I know is really slow right now) to prove I’m capable of having the privilege to solve the level of hard problems I know I can. The push to do and the pull to reflect are actually on the same vector. Forward. It’s about finishing. The last 20% is when most of the learning happens.

Earlier I posed two questions as possible answers to understanding why I drew a blank, this discussion has brought me to the conclusion that it’s only the latter: not finishing my thoughts. I’m curious enough to ask questions and have thoughts. It’d be a shame if I was too distracted to ever turn them into a masterpiece.

After reading all of the above, here’s a much shorter way of saying it:

I realized that I didn’t have an answer to a reflective question because I didn’t spend enough time and effort finishing my thoughts. If I put in the effort to thoroughly connect the associations related to my initial thoughts, then I would clarify my own internal understanding of things and communicate them effectively because I would be creating something new, and learning.

This is nothing groundbreaking. It’s breaking ground.

P.S

Including some tangental thoughts that didn’t make it in the final version, but here for further exploring:

  • The importance of finishing things in life (not just thoughts)
  • The ability to focus on one thing for an above average period of time correlates to success
  • The ability to focus will become more important as an AI-driven world becomes more condensed and digestible; offering the chance to forego deep thinking and meaning-making.
  • We are unique because we have our own perspective. If you don’t bring your own thoughts and perspective, you’re replaceable by an AI.

Footnotes

  1. it obviously didn’t land because it lacked the personal-ness and clarity that comes from having reflected on such a question before. the answer was along the lines of how i’m more confident that ‘product’ is the right career path for me because i’ve been doing ‘product’ my whole life in how i approached problem solving with the end goal (customer and business) in mind. true, but weak. ironically, if i had fully-fleshed this idea out more, it could’ve been a good answer and a good fit. ↩

  2. i like that metaphor. It’s symbolic of the trend in our society, too. Maybe there’s an english word to describe that use of a metaphor. ↩

  3. it could also be that I’m shying away from creating the masterpiece because it’s a masterpiece. story for another day. i think this is less of a factor to the problem here. ↩

  4. consistency is something I’m working on. if not consistency, it’s the resiliency to restart. interestingly, thats consistency in another form. either way, i’ll surely be writing about it soon and the biological and environmental factors that affect my ability to be so. ↩