Deciding How To Think

English painter Sir Joshua Reynolds is credited with saying that “there is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.” The phrasing carries impact, revealing a defining quality of critical thinking that has us slow to engage it: its perceived laboriousness. It’s not so much the function of thinking we’re averse to, but the function of challenging it, of choosing to assess its merit further. In Meditations, Stoic philosopher and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius tells of how he "escaped the power of circumstance" by recognizing that the harm was not outside him, but within his judgements—within his own thinking.

Implicit throughout Stoic texts is the encouragement of accountability for everything that happens to us by way of owning our thoughts about them. Put another way, what we control in our experiences is how we experience them. Understood in its fullness, our capacity for thinking is the superpower that arms us to adopt the useful perspective in all things. Purposeful thinking allows us to decide what we make of any given moment.

Engage your capacity for thinking by deciding how it is you want to think. The default perception, or the loudest perspective, need not be the only one.

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