If you want to be a top-notch thinker, you have to do the work yourself. That is to say, you have to do the thinking. You can’t let anyone else do it for you. That might sound obvious, but you’d be surprised how often we take the convenient shortcut of adopting other people’s thinking.
All right, I’ll let you off working out the theory of relativity for yourself. There are specialist areas where you don’t have the skills to do the relevant thinking, and you’re allowed to let scientists, mathematicians, top-flight economists and statisticians and engineers do your thinking for you.2 Even so, don’t take their word for anything until you’ve established in your own mind that they know what they’re talking about and have no discernible bias.
Other than these exceptions – where you need high-level training to understand the thought processes – from now on, you do all your own thinking, for yourself, by yourself. Unless you’re an independent thinker, you really can’t call yourself a thinker at all.
Everyone has a different perspective, and another person’s logic isn’t always going to be right for you. We are all individuals, and not only is it lazy to let other people think for you, it doesn’t necessarily lead to the right conclusions. So the Rules in this first section are the foundation that you need to lay before you can get any value from the remaining Rules of Thinking.
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2 Apologies if you’re a world-class physicist.