Thinking.
We all do it. And strangely we all assume that we do it "right" or at least "well". If we didn't, we would already be thinking something else!
We don't necessarily spend thought space on "I do it right". We only discover that belief if our thoughts are challenged. Our resistance to new ways of thinking indicate how entrenched we are in hanging onto what we have thought up until that moment.
But what if "right" or "well" aren't even helpful measures of your thinking?
What if the capacity for options is more powerful than whether or not the option you operate from is the "right" one.
The willingness and ability to explore both optional perspectives and optional thought processes is the mental equivalent of international travel. The cultures and ways of every nation and culture are so infinitely varied that if we would, we could discover endless ways of thinking, each a new perspective for the previously untraveled person.
What if brilliant thinking is not the quest for the right answer, rather it is the discovery of how much more is possible? What if brilliance is the expansion of our capacity to take in, evaluate reality and approach circumstances or problems with a rich repertoire of perspective and thought process.
When "thinking" becomes for us a search for an answer, it is by definition a narrowing process. When thinking operates as exploration or meta-cognition it is always expansive.
"You are more than you think you are"...and you currently hear or read that statement through the lens of who you currently think you are. To really grasp the depth and breadth of that statement, you would have to expand your thinking beyond its current framework.
The limit to our thinking is not content. It is not that our current stock of information is low. The limit to our thinking is that we think about thinking as "how much we know", rather than "how do we see things and how many other possible perspective can we open up to".
Einstein famously said, "You cannot solve a problem at the same level of thinking that created the problem." He did not say you cannot solve a problem with your current knowledge base. His statement was about thought process, not thought content.
Problem solving is an exercise in shift more than effort. When you begin to see how much more your brain is capable of, you begin to see everything differently.