🤔 TREE 587: How to be smarter than almost everyone with virtually no effort

You’ve probably read or heard this ‘fact’ before:

In 2005, the National Science Foundation published an article summarizing research on human thoughts per day. It was found that the average person has about 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts per day. Of those thousands of thoughts, 80% were negative, and 95% were exactly the same repetitive thoughts as the day before. (Source)

It’s all over the internet, mostly connected to people telling you what you should do or buy to have more original thoughts. I was going to do a fun post that flipped the whole thing on its head and illustrated your potential for creativity.

My first order of business: look at the original research to make sure it says what the internet says it says. Less than five minutes’ googling and reading revealed that the National Science Foundation published no such article, nor is there general agreement on how one counts thoughts or possibly even what a discrete thought is.

Last week I wrote that when you are presented with a fantastic or fantastical piece of information, it’s important to do a sense check. Let me add to that:

Do some basic research.

It doesn’t take long and it will make you smarter than the 97% (a number I just made up) of people whose main sources of truth are their Uncle Boffo, inspirational quotes from fashion influencers and the first three results of their Google search.

An excellent song with some very impressive choreography.

Grow slowly
Jeff