HINGE YOURSELF TO THE PERSON YOU ASPIRE TO BE
The Power of Hinging
3 Steps to Powerful Thinking in less than 2 minutes
“Ask yourself if the topper of the class would go to the movies as often as you are” — one of my professors advised me as I stared at him while wondering why wasn’t I seeing improvement in my grades. I thought I had hit a plateau and before taking the biggest (debatable) exam in India, I wanted to be sure that I was doing everything I could to prepare. My professor was advising me to hinge my thinking on the best behaviour I could think of.
Although I did not properly understand and implement the advice back then, I feel it be quite an important step in my overall development in the later years. The advice is basically to find an ideal behaviour or an ideal response to a situation by looking at the best you know. This small piece of advice seems very simple at the surface but can be very powerful if adopted. It calls on you to hinge your behaviour on the best practises you have as references — the better the reference, the more powerful you can enable your thinking.
Upgrading your thinking can heavily influence your actions and can produce success. An easy 3 step system to get some powerful thinking habits can be summarised as follows:
1. Find situations and domains for yourself that you want to improve upon
2. Find important people that you want to hinge your behaviour on — this could be entrepreneurs if you are a startup enthusiast, an architect if you want to grasp a better sense of design understanding, etc.
3. Ask yourself what would the best person you know in the domain do when faced with a similar situation?
This method allows you to empower and uplift your thinking to the level best known to you. Once you start thinking in the league of the best individuals you know, you start identifying elements that are important, you start understanding the bigger picture and you start your work on the person you want to become.
