Freethinker Flywheel

Freethinker Mindframe Shift #2

 "What’s The ONE THING that I need to know?”

When you want to learn or build something new, it’s tempting to just get going. Read as much as you can, do some tutorials, work on some related projects. Short-term, this gives you a motivation boost. You feel like you’re moving forward. But, after a while, you notice that you’re not progressing as fast as you expected. You may even start burning out. Turns out, cramming content inside your brain is not the most effective way to grow. Instead, you need to develop your Freethinker Agency

Michelangelo, perhaps history’s greatest sculptor, understood this concept to his bones. Two of his more famous quotes speak directly to it:

• Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.
• I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free

For Michelangelo, his Freethinker Agency was already there, inside the hunk of stone, whether by divine providence or his own imagination. His eyes and hands were merely the vessels by which that idea—the art—was brought forth into the physical world as he or God (or both) originally intended.

The Freedom Question : How To Find Your One Thing

The Focusing Question forces you to make the best decision about what to focus on and what actions to take.

What's The One Thing That I Need To Know, Such That By Knowing It, Everything Else Will Become Easy Or Unnecessary? 

The Focusing Question can lead you to answer not only “big picture” questions (Where am I going? What target should I aim for?) but also “small focus” ones as well (What must I do right now to be on the path to getting the big picture? Where’s the bullseye?).

Freethinker Flywheel

What is Metacognition?

The word “metacognition” literally means “above cognition” — it’s one of the most powerful forms of self-monitoring and self-regulation. It’s a fancy word for something fairly simple once you break it down.

Put simply, metacognition is “thinking about thinking” or “knowing about knowing.” It’s being aware of your own awareness so you can determine the best strategies for learning and problem-solving, as well as when to apply them.

Creating Mental Flywheels

The Benefits of Metacognition?

Metacognition can help you maximize your potential to think, learn, and create, all while taking care of your mental health. Beyond the elevated self-awareness and consciousness you’ll experience by applying metacognitive strategies, scientists have investigated some of the many benefits of metacognition.

• Learn better. Research shows that high-metacognition learners identify challenges much faster and change their tools and strategies to better achieve their learning goals. Metacognition can even compensate for IQ and lack of prior knowledge when it comes to solving new problems.
• Make decisions faster. Monitoring and controlling your ongoing cognitive activity can make you aware of your cognitive biases and help avoid mistakes, or at least not reproduce the same mistakes twice. In addition, because of heightened awareness, metacognition leads to a reduction in response time, which reduces the time to solve a problem or complete a task.
• Be more creative. According to Dr Markus Lång, all narrative works of art can be defined as metacognitive artifacts which are designed by the creator to anticipate and regulate the cognitive processes of the recipient. Intrinsically speaking, creativity is thinking about thinking.
• Improve your mental health. Metacognition gives you the ability to understand your mental health and to adapt your strategies to cope with the source of any distress. As such, researchers defined metacognition as the process that “reinforces one’s subjective sense of being a self and allows for becoming aware that some of one’s thoughts and feelings are symptoms of an illness.”

As you can see, metacognition really is the mind’s Swiss Army knife. That one ability can help you learn better, make decisions faster, be more creative, and improve your mental health. So, how can you experience those benefits?