I wrote this while listening to the album “Cloudy Skies” by TOPS. It’s unseasonably warm out today and the music fits.

How you think is way more important than what you think.

A Day in the Life of a Janitor

The faintest whiff of Sprayway glass cleaner rockets me back in time. It is Saturday morning, and I am 16 years old, making $4 an hour wiping down large glass entry doors to some dingy trucking company offices in the middle of nowhere, Ohio. I spend a lot of time alone with my thoughts while I’m scraping the rust off truck bumpers (and breathing plenty of it), spraying Round-Up around the semi-truck lot while stopping to pick up abandoned piss bottles, and mowing 30 acres of meadow with a 10-foot-wide mower. I have a lot of time to think about how I don’t want to do this for the rest of my life.

Since it’s about a decade before I’ll buy my first smartphone, I keep my mind entertained the only way I can—by thinking. As my hands perform their repetitive tasks, my mind locks onto a problem and spins out in every direction, thinking about solutions. My hands are occupied, so all of the information resides in memory. Big problems have many long hallways, stairs, levels, and doors, and my mind walks over the entire terrain with a little lantern lighting up the whole space. In this way, I etch the method of exploring problems into my consciousness with a blunt instrument—it becomes a part of me. This style of thinking becomes muscle memory. The problem spaces gradually become more complex and vast. All I have to do is utter the problem, then my mind turns into a glob of enzymes passively digesting it.

At the end of my shift, I drive my sweet champagne-colored 1999 Camry with fuzzy dice on the mirror that I can now afford to put gas in to my girlfriend’s parents’ house. By the time I arrive, the elaborate problem spaces I’ve built in my head have disintegrated and blown away. I am a teenager in love, and this state of being is incompatible with thinking.

How To Think

Speaking as someone who has seen a lot of academia, I can confidently say that college teaches you what to think. It wasn’t until I was preparing for my dissertation defense that any time was given to how to think.

The way in which I think, established while I was a janitor, is behind all of my successes.

For better or worse, the way you think is largely established between the ages of 8 and 25. By the time you’re 25, your prefrontal cortex is fully baked. You can change how you think at any time, but it’s significantly harder after your mid-20s.

How To Learn How To Think

There are two reasons we’re not taught how to think in school. First, it’s not measurable, so we can’t evaluate someone’s human worth based on a number, which makes many business-types anxious. The Druckerian mind virus has unfortunately become endemic in American culture. Second, it’s highly individualized, and schools are homogenization machines (again, “what” to think, not “how”).

Solitude and Boredom

Solitude and boredom—both in copious amounts—are the two main ingredients necessary for learning how to think. The only other thing you need is a bit of levain to get the reaction going. You can use a lot of things for levain. For me, reading works by or about Socrates, Hunter S. Thompson, Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, Jean-Paul Sartre, Charles Bukowski, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Jack Kerouac, Timothy Leary, and J.R.R. Tolkien did the trick.

You need to be creative with sourcing and curating your levain! I was fairly isolated in a very rural part of the country in a time before social media ubiquity. I didn’t have the means to travel a lot, so I drew heavily from books. When I was a janitor, if I had $5 for either books or gas, I’d buy the book! The levain is the unique thing that has sway over what kind of thought patterns develop and become habitual—ensure that you’re feeding the brain-machine with good stuff, clean fuel.

If you trained an LLM on the authors I listed, the way it thinks would probably come out pretty similar to the way I process things. Your levain, despite being the smallest ingredient, is everything. The solitude and boredom are both necessary in huge quantities, but the mind will do its thing on the levain you’ve given it.

The scary thing about this is starting with shitty levain—like if it has mold on it or something. You’ll bake bread that tastes bad and maybe even makes you sick. I probably had a bit of mold on my levain; maybe we all do. But insofar as you’re able, you want to limit it!

What’s your levain now? Is it bad stock—comprised of watching reality TV, traveling for the Instagram photos, reading celebrity news, choosing books that reinforce your existing way of thinking, never challenging the status quo, and cooking the same food every night?

Or,

Is it turning off the TV, traveling to places you actually want to go (no matter how boring Instagram might deem them), abandoning all interest in “celebrities” precisely because they are celebrities, picking books that are antithetical to who you think you are, using your voice like a sword to question the things that nobody else has the courage to question, and cooking dishes so exotic that you can’t get the spices at Kroger?