The Importance of Thinking Differently — The Lessons I Learned from Plato
A few weeks ago, I was reading about one of my favorite people of all time, Richard Feynman. Now, I am no physics geek, but why I like Richard Feynman is his framework for making discoveries. Feynman said something that stuck with me.
“Now all these ideas of thinking about things you can measure or lets formulate the equation mathematically, or let’s guess the equation, are tried all the time…. But the new problem where we are stuck is because all those methods don’t work …. The method or trick to solve it will be very different than anything we have seen before because we have used everything from before.”
Now, me being someone in research, I think that this quote is very interesting to think about. It stresses the importance of something that thought leaders, Olympic level CEOs, and tech-geniuses alike have all been preaching, think different.
I went looking for different people in history who have been all (ironically) speaking about the same idea to think different. One of the people who has best described this idea was also one of the first, his name was Plato.
Plato was born between 429 & 423 BC and is one of the Athenian philosophers that we all know of, he was also a student of Socrates (learn more about Socrates in last week’s article).
He was a different thinker, one who was not scared to challenge society’s current beliefs which have led him to become one of the most respected philosophers of all time.
Plato spent his life thinking. His goal in life was to get people to reach a state called Eudaimonia. There is no direct English translation of the word Eudaimonia but I like to describe it as a state of happiness through fulfillment. Here is a definition I liked:
“A life of eudaimonia is a life of striving. It’s a life of pushing yourself to your limits, and finding success. A eudaimonistic life will be full of the happiness that comes from achieving something really difficult, rather than just having it handed to you.”
To get people to this state, Plato had many ideas of how one should live but I think that 3 stood out.
- Think More: To reach our optimal potential, we need to think about ourselves and the world around us. This will help us find our inner harmony, create perfect societies, and work towards our purpose in life.
- Reform Society: Plato thought a lot about the best possible way a society can function. One of his most famous ideas was the Philosopher King, where the leaders of society should be the philosophers. His reasoning behind this was that the leaders of other fields, medicine, art, literature, were given to the most experienced people in those fields. Therefore, running societies should be a philosophers job.
- Love and Art Grow Your Character: Plato described ideal love as seeking something that can make you a better person. Described that everyone has a missing part to them, and love and art are made to fill those holes.
The thing that resonated with me the most about Plato, is about him thinking so differently than everyone else at the time.
He was living in arguably one of the greatest places and times, the golden age of Greece. Although he was seeing all of the innovation and new thoughts rising around him, he was not afraid to question if society was functioning the right way.
One of his greatest ideas was all about a new approach to thinking… The Forms.
The Forms are Optimal Versions of Reality
His theory of forms states that ideal versions of reality that are currently non-physical represent what we should strive for. The Platonic Forms describe what every person, society, a topic should optimally look like. His view was that it only makes sense to strive for these ideal forms of reality.
A good way to imagine this is that although no one has seen or drawn a perfectly straight line, we can still imagine it. Therefore we can strive for it.
This theory of Forms is a great way to approach life, and it is very different than how most people approach it. For most people, they think about how they can set them up for next week, or next year, or in the next 5 years. It is a very reactive approach.
But if we use Plato’s philosophy of Forms, we realize we have to approach life looking at our end goals and reverse engineering them to best set us up for our optimal form of living.
It also ties into the notion of thinking 10x. It is about not trying to improve a system by 10% but to improve how it is done by 10x the amount it is at right now. Some 10x inventions include electricity, the car, the internet, and the phone.
This is not how the average person thinks, but it is a framework to achieve optimal results. It is the people who think in this way who separate themselves from the crowd.
Plato had a great story that he wrote which describes how thinking differently can get us these results, and also why the average person does not seek it.
The Allegory of the Cave
This story is about several prisoners who are locked up in a cave where their hands and head are locked in one place so they can only look forward. Behind them is a fire which illuminates the wall they are looking at.
When objects or people pass by the fire, a rough shadow appears on the wall in front of the prisoners. The prisoners name some of these objects and play games at how fast they can identify the objects.
One day, one of the prisoner’s locks become undone and he is free. He turns around and the fire blinds his eyes since he has been looking at the shadows for all of his life. He is tempted to return, but something causes him to continue ascending the cave.
Once he reaches outside, the sun now blinds his eyes. But again, he is motivated to keep going.
After a while, he can start looking at the reflection of light in the water, and soon enough, he can start looking at everything. He realizes that everything he looked at before was not the real world and he begins to understand the world. The prisoner then goes on his journey to discover things about this real-world like beauty and art.
He returns to the cave to inform the other prisoners of what he discovered. He tells them how the world they see is not true reality and they need to come out. They dismiss him and they start playing games again.
The prisoner who escaped keeps losing the games because his eyes have adjusted to outside. The other prisoners call him stupid.
This story is so meaningful and I highly recommend reading the actual passage from book VII of Plato’s The Republic.
One of the main points from this story is how we mistake appearance for reality a lot of the times. As humans, we are over-optimized for the present. We believe that what is most convenient for ourselves in the present moment will be the best for us in the future.
This worked throughout history but our current society is very different from the one we have now.
Due to the surge of data and information we all have at our fingertips, there are so many conflicting opinions and everything you read might not be true. I find it super fascinating how we have more information than ever, but less truth.
It is more convenient for us in every moment to assume something is true, but this causes us to be one of the believers in the shadows on the wall, rather than the actual world around us.
But it is not only on an individual level. A point that is emphasized is that our environment determines our mindset.
When the prisoner re-enters the cave, he is put down to believing he is stupid because he cannot win games in a system. Even if someone is finding the truth, it is important to think differently than them because they have different goals than you.
This point is summarized with an article I recently read called The Psychology of Money.
“If you start taking cues from people playing a different game than you are, you are bound to be fooled and eventually become lost, since different games have different rules and different goals.”
When a system mistakes appearance or popularity as truth, the system does not set up people for success. This is one of the main realizations when the prisoner ventures outside.
We see this to be very prevalent in systems today such as school. Where the system of marks is becoming less relevant as our society evolves but it is mistaken by the appearance of getting into a good university as a success. But in reality, true success varies from person to person and is separate from how much you know or are educated.
This also displays Plato’s thoughts on the treatment of philosophers. As although they are seeking the truth, they are looked down upon because they are disproving what is popular.
For me, the main takeaway after reading the Allegory of the Cave is how important it is to think different. It is hard to know through conventional thinking what we want in life or if we are set-up to achieve what we want when we are in systems mistaking appearance for truth.
Overall, to achieve whatever I want, it will be from seeking the truth, reflecting on my values, and from thinking about the optimal version of society and myself.
Steve Jobs, the king of thinking different, said it the best in this video.
Key Takeaways:
- Problems are solved by approaching them in a different way of thinking than ever before
- Plato’s goal in life was for people to reach a state in life called Eudaimonia which is about finding happiness and fulfillment through struggle
- Plato’s ideas on forms state that ideal versions of reality that are currently non-physical represent what we should strive for
- We must think differently because it causes us to understand ourselves, our goals, and makes us seek the truth rather than popularity