How to Think for Yourself

The end goal is not to find flaws in the things you're told, but to find the new ideas that had been concealed by the broken ones.

You may not care much what you wear, but there are intellectual fashions too, and you definitely don't want to participate in those. Not just because you want sovereignty over your own thoughts, but because unfashionable ideas are disproportionately likely to lead somewhere interesting.

You can also take more explicit measures to prevent yourself from automatically adopting conventional opinions. The most general is to cultivate an attitude of skepticism.

More generally your goal should be not to let anything into your head unexamined, and things don't always enter your head in the form of statements. Some of the most powerful influences are implicit. How do you even notice these? By standing back and watching how other people get their ideas.

Perhaps, if your goal is to discover novel ideas, your motto should not be "do what you love" so much as "do what you're curious about."

The third component of independent-mindedness, curiosity, may be the most interesting.

We need to look at the internal structure of independent-mindedness.

Can you make yourself more independent-minded?

When you stand back at a sufficient distance, you can see ideas spreading through groups of people like waves.

It's enough to have one or two you can talk to regularly. And once you find them, they're usually as eager to talk as you are; they need you too.