Thinking Crisp Thoughts

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs is one of my heroes because he could think crisply and simply.

To think crisply means to be able to cut through the noise and notice the essence and meaning of a thought.

Let me preface that we don’t know what thoughts are. Thoughts might be a substance different to material objects. Thoughts might be collective neural oscillations or brain waves, or perhaps a combination of electrical brain waves and chemical information signals.

If in reality thoughts are signals in the brain, then to have crisp thoughts is to have thoughts which are not interrupted or clouded by irrelevant noise. That could be other thoughts, memories or even signals coming in from the external environment.

To use an analogy, by paying closer attention to thoughts, we can tune them like we might tune an old radio or antenna dial on an old television to make the picture clearer.

But in reality, instead of moving a physical dial to tune thought, we do it by taking our focus and directing it to the thought in order to extract the simple meaning of the thought that might be engulfed in a stream of noise.

To think cleanly and crisply is to use focus intentionally to amplify the message and meaning of a thought. This allows you to be more right about future predictions, and to clearly project your own vision.