| Think through, then follow through is good
advice. If you do heavy lifting with your mind, physical lifting can be efficient,
productive, and pleasant.
Abraham Lincoln, one of the greatest thinkers the United
States has produced, grew up in a culture that held thinking in low esteem. With a
frontier to tame, land to clear, and riches to claim, Lincoln felt constant pressure to
get out and do something. Lincoln's father made this observation about his
soon-to-be-famous son: "If Abe don't fool away all his time on his books, he may make
something yet." Lincoln was 27 years old at the time.
In American society even today, action often is more highly
regarded than thought, doing more than being. To be called an intellectual can be deadly
for an American politician.
Yet this quintessential American politician became an
intellectual. He was thinking all the time. In fact, we know quite a bit about Lincoln's
thought processes. One observer who kept a careful record of what he saw was Lincoln's
private secretary, John G. Nicolay. Here is Nicolay's observation.
"...Mr. Lincoln often resorted to the process of
cumulative thought, and his constant tendency to, and great success in axiomatic
definition resulted in a large measure from a habit he had acquired of reducing a forcible
idea or an epigrammatic sentence or phrase to writing, and keeping it until further reason
enabled him to add other sentences or additional phrases to complete or supplement the
first--to elaborate or to conclude his point or argument. There were many of these scraps
among his papers, seldom in the shape of mere rough notes, but almost always in the form
of a finished proposition or statement--a habit showing great prudence and deliberation of
thought, and evincing a corresponding strength and solidity of opinion and argument."
(Michael Burlingame, editor, An Oral History of Abraham Lincoln: John G. Nicolay's
Intervays and Essays. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996, p.
107)
You can use this Lincoln technique yourself. Here's how.
First, write it down.
Over five centuries ago Sir Francis Bacon wrote,
"Writing maketh an exact man."
If you're expanding your business or creating one, worrying
about an issue, planning a presentation, or making a hard decision, get the basic idea
down on paper. Authors call it a rough draft. Marketers call it a story board. Programmers
call it a decision tree.
In my executive coaching program, I insist that
participants write down all the alternatives and the possible consequences before arriving
at any important executive decision.
Getting it down on paper makes it easier to refine your
thinking, spot logical fallacies and emotional distortions, and clear away the
distractions that can cloud the thought processes.
Second, oversimplify.
My writing teachers and editors taught me to state any
article or book I was writing as one concise sentence. You may not be able to see the tree
because of the proverbial forest.
You can make bad decisions if you allow yourself to be
distracted by too much information. Push out of your mind any detail or argument that is
not absolutely relevant to the problem at hand. You must be able to focus in on the
specific detail and understand it completely. To use a mathematical analogy, you must
reduce the situation to its least common denominator.
The first time I interviewed John Portman -- who created
Embarcadero Center in San Francisco and the Marriott Marquis on Times Square, among other
famous buildings -- Portman told me that in designing a building, he relentlessly reduced
the concept to its core elements. At the time I barely understood what Portman was talking
about -- it sounded like jargon -- but gradually I discovered that this is a
characteristic of the way all great thinkers think.
Three, connect the dots.
Link logical thoughts together. This is what Nicolay meant
by "cumulative thought." Lincoln had self-taught himself the first six books of
Euclid, so he knew how to construct a mathematical argument. In Lincoln's case, he began
with the core proposition -- "All men are created equal" -- and developed his
concept of a nation as a government of the people, by the people, for the people by adding
the essential ideas that are congruent with the basic, core idea.
This is the way great buildings, business enterprises,
sciences, and nations are constructed. |
