Thinking and doing are unrelated activities
Have you ever noticed that thinking about doing something, and doing it are completely different activities?
Photo by Ged Welch
When we are thinking about something, we are checking our own lived experiences, memories, recollections and learning to date in order to project one or multiple versions of the future. It’s a great way of sense-checking, being thorough and assessing risk.
When we are doing we are engaging our natural capacity to learn through insight and realisation intuitively. As we take steps (big or small) we have insights and respond to our circumstances, by making something new of our previous thinking, or seeing a completely fresh take on what needs to be done next.
All too often we get wrapped up in the thinking about part, and obscure our intuitive capacity to learn, which we only experience when we are in action. Thinking about, without the doing, allows our egos to run the show, getting caught up in being right or scenario planning rather than trusting that we do have a real-time intelligence that is responsive in the moment.
As we look at what’s universal to everyone we see that we are all on a never-ending learning curve, continuously having realisations that help us see what we haven’t seen yet, or reorganising our thoughts more intelligently so that we can see things more clearly. That’s all it is.
Most of us will have a memory of learning something that we were struggling with and there being a moment where the penny dropped, where it went from the struggle of not getting it and overthinking, to the realisation (or series of realisations) where how it worked or what to do became clear – you’ll notice this happens invariably during or after the doing.
Long division? Dividing fractions? Excel formulas? Riding a bike? Kitesurfing? Decoding teenagers? The process is the same even if it looks different on the outside. Sometimes the realisation is quick and painless, a throwing back of the curtain in an instant, other times there are a series of tiny realisations that are barely perceptible but eventually lead us to a new understanding of whatever we are doing.
But if we haven’t got our feet wet, we won’t ever learn to kitesurf. We are all on a learning curve all of the time, and the process is so natural we don’t see it happening.