You Can Watch Your Own Thinking Change If You Keep The Receipts

One of the things that I’ve found most powerful over the past few years is tracking my learning

Not in a ‘This is how many books I’ve read on Goodreads’ kind of way

(I did use to do this and I did find that it made me read different, easier, shorter books just to try and increase the number of books I read, which is obviously very silly.)

But just tracking the things that you are thinking about and how that has changed over time is really useful.

It allows you to track whether you have increased the breadth of your reading, but then also whether the things that you maybe talk about and know well, whether you thought about them in a different way.

Because if someone asks you what you’ve learned over the past few months and you say ‘I’ve learned a lot’

That’s the absence of an answer rather than an answer itself. Not because you’re necessarily trying to evade the question, it’s just a report of something that you actually can’t see.

Annie Duke has a line about this - our brains don’t have “date created” and “date modified” fields.

The only version of your thinking you can open is today’s, and it doesn’t come with a date on it.

So whatever you believe right now feels like the thing you’ve always believed.

Which means the feeling of having a stable mind isn’t evidence of one.

Obviously I have used the Idea Factory to store my ideas for a while now, and so I went through recently the last seven months of my own ideas.

There were 733 of my ideas and these are all separate to things that I’ve got from books, podcasts, YouTube. They’re my interpretations of thoughts, for the work that I do, or sometimes just the way that I see the world.

What I found really interesting is that at the start of the year there was a lot of hypotheses, terms, models that were well published. Things like Signalling Theory, the Handicap Principle, Skinner boxes.

And as we reach the end of July, it’s all my thoughts on how some of these psychological principles are showing up in the food industry, or in coaching, or in business, or in technology.

So while a note on status at the start of the year was how does this work and how does it show up, by July it was this is how these things are being used for status at the moment, this is who profits from them, this is why it’s working the way that it is.

I can track the exact moment where collecting other people’s ideas turned into me having my own ideas on those topics

Then I can track one further and have an idea of where that started to become so well developed as a thought that it became content for me

Then I can track the engagement - the number of saves in particular for me, it’s really important because it shows that I’m talking about things in a way that other people aren’t, and people want to read again.

I find this really interesting because I didn’t decide for this.

I didn’t resolve to start thinking about how my thoughts on something were going to change over time. And I think if you’d have asked me in June how my thinking had changed, I’d say ‘I’ve thought about loads of things this year’, but maybe you wouldn’t be able to point to what those things are.

It’s kind of like when someone says to you, “Oh, I’m eating the same way that I’ve always eaten, but I’ve gained loads of weight recently.”

Obviously their behaviour has drifted, but they can’t see how it’s drifted.

So I think it’s interesting to turn that principle on ourselves and understand that the value of writing things down and keeping them in one place isn’t just for you to retrieve them.

It makes you falsifiable to yourself, and you can track whether you’ve learned what you’ve changed your mind on, how you’ve changed your mind, how your thinking has developed on these areas over time.

Name one thing you believed in January that you’d argue against today.

If you’ve got one, you’ve been thinking.

If you can’t find one, you can’t actually tell whether you haven’t changed or whether you just can’t see it.