Do You Have Ideas, or do Ideas Have You?

I dare you to wrap your head around this

I listen to Jordan Peterson, but he irritates me on a regular basis.

One of the ways he routinely berates me is by showing me that I’m really not that smart. For example, he said something that made me spill my Cheerios the other day.

“Most of what you say are the thoughts and opinions of someone else. In fact, if you only said the things that were geniunly your thoughts, you’d cut out about 95% of what you said and think. You’re carrying around a bunch of dead ideas that aren’t even yours, and than you use them to try to seem smarter than you are and avoid critisism.”

See why I spilled my Cheerios?

He couldn’t have more perfectly attacked the foundation of everything I do than that. I mean, ideas are how I make my living.

That’s the abbreviated version, he also talked about how it’s not necessarily bad to say the opinions of others as long as you don’t hide behind them.

Your thoughts? Or someone else’s?

My first thought when I heard him say that was, “No, that’s not me.” My second thought was, “That’s probably not me, but what if it was?” So I started hunting down the origins of a few ideas rolling around in my head and discovered an uncomfortable truth.

He was right.

At least about the 4 thoughts I had bouncing around at that time. (I know, some of you have 57 thoughts all at the same time, but I don’t. Usually.)

I was still skeptical, so I kept hunting. The next stop was my YouTube channel. Surely the ideas there were mostly original, right?

Almost every single video I made was something I learned from other people. Now, that’s not bad, in fact, that’s the main point of my channel. To take what I’ve learned and condense it down into something interesting for others. But the point still stands, that of all the videos I’ve made, only about 4-5 videos were genuine original ideas. Again, not really a problem, but it did open my eyes.

As I thought about this, I realized that’s what makes a specific topic die on the internet. Take productivity for example. After a while, everyone is just repeating all the best ideas that they heard from each other. There are only so many ways to explain these things. It creates a giant, stale, echo chamber that no one wants to enter into. Then it dies and years later it gets reborn.

Consider the following questions.

When someone asks you why you vote the way you do, do you have your own opinions about that, or are you repeating what someone else told you?

When someone asks you why you believe (fill in the blank) is that what you actually think about it? Or is that what someone smarter than you said in response to that question?

When someone asks about your religious beliefs, is what you say your belief, or a belief formulated by someone more educated than you?

So, what do you think about this? Do you have ideas, or do ideas have you? Is what you say a reflection of dead ideas you’ve harvested from someone else to make you sound smarter than you are? (busted, that’s me, literally by writing this newsletter)

Because let’s face it, ideas are pretty crazy. It only takes one idea to completely change the course of history, for better or worse. We’ve seen what happens when mass amounts of people latch onto an idea without question.

Why do we do this?

Assuming this is accurate for a second, why would someone only repeat the ideas of other people? I think there are a few reasons.

1. Camaflage. Sharing an idea that is actually yours is risky and scary. If someone criticises something you say, you can always pass it off if it’s someone else’s idea. You can hide behind it. But not if it’s your idea.

2. Social exceptance. Certian groups have ideas they routinely cycle through, so an easy way in is simply to repeat those ideas.

3. Intellegence. Want to look smart? Repeat smart people’s thoughts and ideas. Not necessarily a bad thing, although sometimes I question the motivation and wonder if the person repeating it can stand on their own two feet.

4. It’s so much easier. It really does take a lot of work to filter out your opinions from other people.

I think some people don’t want to think at all. A study I found illustrates this quite nicely, where people opted to administer an electric shot to themselves instead of sitting with their thoughts. Although, women seemed to have a better sense of stupidity them men, which is why the men in the study were 3x more likely to shock themselves. Take that however you want.

And if you think you don’t do that, you do. It’s called social media and it’s 10x worse than shocking yourself to prevent boredom.

What’s wrong with this?

Ok, but is this really a problem? Part of me thinks maybe we are better off letting the smart people figure it all out. In theory that could work, but that’s not what’s happening.

What’s happening is you have everyone and his mother’s uncle telling you what to believe. We are being bombarded with opinions, so it’s kinda scary if we don’t know how to separate ours from other people’s. You can encounter more weird, novel, ridiculous ideas now than ever before in history. We need to learn to hold someone’s opinion, really think about it, and form our own conclusions. Intentionally.

How to think for yourself

Pay closer attention.

Like this.

When you are presented with an opinion, ask yourself “What do I actually think about that?” Pause and ponder a bit. If you want to try this out, grab a random belief you have floating around. It’s a really cool experience, giving yourself permission to form your own opinion about something. That’s a weird way of framing it, but that’s sort of what it feels like sometimes. Turn on the TV and you’ll see what I mean. It’s a giant shouting match of what to believe.

But really, pay close attention. Attention is what prevents autopilot mode. Instead of saying what you “know” to be true, pay attention to your thoughts. This lets you pull out opinions rather than information. A library doesn’t have conviction, it has information.

Regardless of whether or not you think most of your opinions are someone else’s, this is still a good exercise to do. If anything it will slow you down and keep conversations more interesting.

So what do you think? Are you controlled by ideas, or are ideas controlled by you?

Here’s an organic idea that got my channel over 4 million views.