In my article two weeks ago, I introduced the idea of the “Thinker Identity,” and I offered that a thinker develops five characteristic ways of thinking:

• Decisive
• Essentialized
• Principled
• Creative
• Value-Oriented

Here’s a new brief summary of my conclusions from parts 1 & 2:

Decisiveness is the ability to make timely decisions that hold the context of the need to act despite the fact that we are fallible, omniscience is a contradiction in terms, and a misalignment between intentions and emotions is a common occurrence. Decisiveness is an aspect of the Thinker Identity because decisions are the means of transforming thought into action; the fundamental purpose of thinking is to guide action. You develop your powers of decisiveness by learning how to resolve inner conflicts, increasing your emotional resilience when they can’t be resolved yet, and systematically resolving them over time.

Essentialization is the process of condensing a large, complex body of information into a simple, retainable, conceptual form that can then serve as a mental hook for retrieving or recreating the details. Essentialized thinking is an aspect of the Thinker Identity because abstract knowledge is developed in stages, hierarchically. The earlier knowledge needs to be held in an essentialized form so that it can be retrieved and used in a more complex thinking process—and still fit in the crow. That’s what permits you to reach more abstract conclusions and form more abstract concepts. You learn to essentialize by practicing the basic conceptual processes: purposeful concretization, differentiation, and conceptual integration.

Now that I’ve spent a couple of weeks chewing what it means to be essentialized, I can be briefer in explaining the remaining characteristics.

Principled

A principle is “a fundamental, primary, or general truth, on which other truths depend.” (AR, “The Anatomy of Compromise”) Principled thinking is thinking that systematically activates knowledge of previously validated principles so that it can be applied to fresh thinking tasks. This expedites and simplifies the process of reaching new conclusions. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

So, for example, if you know and use the principle that man has volition, it is relatively easy to explain man’s fallibility. If you know and use Newton’s 1st law of motion (F = mA), you can relatively easily calculate the force needed to cause a space ship to shift from its current trajectory into a trajectory that orbited the moon.

Thinking in principles presupposes that you have already learned and understood the principles in terms of essentials — they are stored properly in your mental database. When you think in principles, you systematically activate and apply that knowledge to new thinking. You don’t just hope that your knowledge of principles will be activated by association. You initiate their recall.

Principled thinking is essential to the Thinker Identity because it ensures you hold the widest context of knowledge and thereby make the best judgments possible.

You develop the ability to think in principles by systematically integrating them with your personal experiences, your values, and other fundamental knowledge. You fully reduce them to perceptual experience — your perceptual experience.

For example, the “primacy of existence” principle asserts that the mind must conform to reality, not the other way around. This is a deceptively simple principle. I often see people get tripped up in applying this principle in setting goals. They decide that to succeed, they need to change another person’s beliefs or behaviors.

But man has free will. It is true that sometimes what you say or do will be observed by others and they will be inspired or influenced by it. But that depends on their choices; you literally cannot change another person’s mind. If you set as your goal to change someone else’s mind, you are not accepting this fact of reality.

This type of mistaken goal-setting always has its roots in your experiencing frustration in response to what the other person does or says. You don’t want to feel that frustration, so it seems like the easiest thing to do would be to change the stimulus — to change their behavior or beliefs. This always backfires and leads to many estrangements. In fact, if you changed your behavior and rooted out your mistaken beliefs (such as that you should be able to change other people), you needn’t experience that frustration in the first place. You do have control over your own mind, including indirect control over your emotions.

There are at least four principles involved in this mistaken thinking, any one of which could untangle it if you knew and applied it:

• Primacy of existence
• Man has volition
• A goal needs to be under your volitional control
• Emotions are alerts to possible values at stake, not sources of knowledge

Principled thinking means you look out for principles that may be relevant and incorporate them into your thinking. This becomes part of your validation process.

If you don’t do this, you wind up treating principles as out-of-context rules that seem to give you a shortcut to knowledge but instead lead to rationalistic conclusions, bafflement, and suffering. For example, I learned F = mA as a floating equation, with very little physical understanding of the phenomenon. This meant that I could only solve textbook problems using the formula; I never developed any common sense about real-world forces and acceleration. More philosophically, some people take the principle “emotions are not tools of cognition” as a rule to follow, resulting in their ignoring their emotions; this estranges them from their own values and kills their capacity for joy.

Creative

This brings us to creative thinking. I disagree with the common belief that creative thinking consists of finding a hundred disparate uses for a paper clip or putting known things together in a surprising or unfamiliar way, such as in a collage or Lois Cook’s word salad.

Creative thinking consists of coming up with many ways to solve a particular problem, many lines of integration to validate a given conclusion, many different approaches to pursue a long-range goal, many different examples to communicate a specific point. In other words, creative thinkers can dream up many different means to achieve a stated end.

This is essential to the Thinker Identity because man is neither infallible nor omniscient. When you set a goal, you cannot know exactly how you will achieve it. The more creative you are in the thinking stage, the more likely you can start on the best path in the doing stage. However, even if you have a pretty good idea of the how, not everything will go according to plan. You will discover new facts that change your assumptions. You’ll hit the limits of your present skills and find you need to grow certain capacities. That’s why you should only set a goal if it is worth the effort to figure out how to recover from setbacks.

(If you are only interested in doing that which requires no special effort, no risk of failure, and a guarantee that you will be comfortable at every step of the way, whatever you are doing, it is not pursuing a goal.)

For example, creativity is needed to use someone else’s method to achieve your particular goal. It’s very rare that another person can literally give you step-by-step instructions that are all you need. They have different knowledge, different skills, and different values. Some things are easier for them, some harder. What you can learn from others is a conceptual strategy and concrete signposts that can help guide you on your way. But the actual figuring out of the steps to take now requires a little creativity. When the words “But I don’t know how” come up, you need to treat that, not as the end of action, but as the start of a creative thinking process.

Creativity is a cognitive skill involving two elements.

1) You need to learn to roam over and consider the random ideas that occur to you. This means no prejudging them as impractical, silly, or anything else. This process is often referred to as turning off your critical voice, but it’s really a positive process. Yes, in a sense you ignore the doubts — for the moment — but it’s better to frame it as you are intentionally mining your databanks for anything that seems to be potentially related to a solution. Then you intentionally get curious about every far-out idea that occurs to you, and deliberately ask yourself how the far-out idea might help you achieve the goal. The truth is that far-out ideas can prompt practical ideas if you stay curious. I teach this under the heading of “brainstorming by your lonesome.” You first learn it on easy, low-stakes issues, and eventually you get the hang of it and can flip into this kind of thinking at will.

2) You need to develop emotional resilience. When you have a setback or failure, you will feel bad for at least a short time. Those emotions draw you in to focusing on what went wrong and what you did wrong. That kind of focus is more likely to give you the illusion that your goal is impossible than to give you great new ideas for another way forward. You need to be able to experience the downers and still manage your mind to focus on what you learned and how that new knowledge makes clearer what is required to achieve the goal. The sooner you can do that, the sooner you can start roaming over new ideas for how to make that happen.

Value-Oriented

Value-oriented thinking is thinking that consistently focuses (and re-focuses) on the value to be gained, not the threat to be avoided. Life is the pursuit of values; no threat has any meaning apart from the value threatened. I have written a lot about values and the value orientation in the past. In brief, value-oriented thinking is not “positive” or “optimistic” or “feel good.” It is serious — you face every situation knowing your purpose and its meaning in terms of your deepest values. It means that you look at every situation from the perspective of the values at stake and their importance to you. This is what motivates you to face challenges and deal with setbacks and failures. You never take your eye off the deep values important to you.

For example, if you get laid off from a high-earning job, you don’t obsess over the difficulty of getting a new one or desperately accept the first offer made to you. You take this as an opportunity to take stock of what you want in your career. You do the work to apply to jobs that fit, but not from desperation. You do it from the perspective that you see how you would be a huge asset to them, and you are looking for a great fit where you could thrive and they would profit. If money is tight, you matter-of-factly reduce your expenses and/or take a retail job to get you over the rough patch. And you don’t let that affect your self-image.

And if it turns out that you can’t easily replace your old job, you figure out why. Has the market for your expertise shifted? Are you coming up against stereotypes that older people don’t keep up with technology and so younger people are better hires? Are you having difficulty explaining your expertise and ability to contribute? Once you figure out why, you then incorporate this information into your thinking, and use your creativity to come up with a new path to achieve your long-range goals.

Value-oriented thinking is necessary for achieving long-range goals. When you are value-oriented, you are constantly identifying means-ends relationships between the present circumstances, the possibilities for action, and your longer-range goals. This adds value-significance to all of the means. This makes the process of pursuing your goal a value in itself. The larger your goals, the more this is necessary for success. In contrast, if you live in a reactive mode, focused on threats and pressures and the difficulty of the moment, you live small. You only look for the quick fixes, the patches, and the short-term payoffs. You don’t build the motivation to work consistently over months and years to create something large.

The value-orientation is necessary to achieving long-range goals, but why is value-oriented thinking essential to the Thinker Identity per se? Because long-range, value-guided action is necessary to integrate your value hierarchy around your most fundamental values. And an integrated value hierarchy makes all other thinking faster and more accurate. Lightning-like insights come, not from seeing the logical connections between things, but from seeing their value-significance.

Thinking in essentials helps organize your knowledge logically, and this speeds up logical mental processes. Thinking in principles makes it easier to retrieve fundamental knowledge when necessary. But memory fundamentally works by values. The stronger your value hierarchy, the easier to bring up relevant stored knowledge, observations, and experiences. The more efficiently you bring up the relevant information, the faster and better you are at solving problems, making decisions, and setting goals. Indeed, I believe that a general truth on which other truths depend only starts functioning as a principle when its cognitive value has been fully integrated with your value hierarchy. What allows people to think in principles is that they see the value of the principles, they have used the principles to guide thinking, and therefore each principle has taken on a place of importance in their value hierarchy. This is what makes a relevant principle occur to you with trucklike clarity at the moment it is needed.

So how do you develop skill at orienting to values? First: systematic in-depth introspection of all of your emotions. Rather than stopping once you identify the idea which gives rise to the emotion, you go deeper to determine the deep rational values at stake that prompted it and the personal meaning that explains its intensity. So you don’t just say, “I feel angry because that person didn’t come on time.” You find out what is at stake for you — for one person it might be predictability, for another respect, for a third ease. And then, if you were really angry, you figure out why it mattered so much for you in this situation that you have the predictability, respect, or ease.

Second: systematic internal conflict resolution. Just as there are no necessary conflicts among rational men, there are no necessary conflicts within a person’s soul. Just as interpersonal conflicts are best resolved by win-win solutions, internal conflicts are resolved permanently by identifying the values at stake and making the choices of which matters most, and then following through in action to program your values to match your conscious convictions. The more you resolve internal conflicts, the more explicitly you will understand your value priorities and the easier it will be to orient to values in any situation.

* * *

That concludes the bulk of this series, but there will still be a part 4, because I haven’t discussed the characteristics that I didn’t include. There are two that are mentioned in the Objectivist corpus, and one that is a standard topic of other people’s thinking courses. So I’ll share that and conclude next time. No one wrote in with thoughts on what those might be, but I’m still game to hear from you.