How to Think for Yourself
November 2020 There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking differently from your peers.
2020 年 11 月 有些工作如果不与同龄人有不同的想法，你就无法做好。
To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be correct.
例如，要成为一名成功的科学家，仅仅正确是不够的。
Your ideas have to be both correct and novel.
你的想法必须既正确又新颖。
You can't publish papers saying things other people already know.
你不能发表别人已经知道的事情的论文。
You need to say things no one else has realized yet.
你需要说出其他人还没有意识到的事情。
The same is true for investors.
对于投资者来说也是如此。
It's not enough for a public market
对于公共市场来说这还不够
investor to predict correctly how a company will do.
投资者正确预测公司将如何做。
If a lot of other people make the same prediction, the stock price will already reflect it, and there's no room to make money.
如果很多人都做出同样的预测，股价就已经反映出来了，就没有赚钱的空间了。
The only valuable insights are the ones most other investors don't share.
唯一有价值的见解是大多数其他投资者不分享的见解。
You see this pattern with startup founders too.
你在初创公司创始人身上也会看到这种模式。
You don't want to start a startup to do something that everyone agrees is a good idea, or there will already be other companies doing it.
你不想创办一家初创公司去做每个人都认为是个好主意的事情，或者已经有其他公司在这样做了。
You have to do
你必须做
something that sounds to most other people like a bad idea, but that you know isn't like writing software for a tiny computer used by a few thousand hobbyists, or starting a site to let people rent airbeds on strangers' floors.
对大多数人来说，这听起来像是一个坏主意，但你知道，这并不像为几千名爱好者使用的小型计算机编写软件，或者创建一个网站让人们在陌生人的地板上租用充气床。
Ditto for essayists.
对于散文家来说也是如此。
An essay that told people things they already knew would be boring.
一篇告诉人们他们已经知道的事情的文章会很无聊。
You have to tell them something <a href="useful.html"> new .
你必须告诉他们一些<a href="useful.html">新的东西。
But this pattern isn't universal.
但这种模式并不普遍。
In fact, it doesn't hold for most
事实上，它不适用于大多数人
kinds of work.
各种工作。
In most kinds of work to be an administrator, for example all you need is the first half.
在大多数工作中——例如，成为一名管理员——你所需要的只是前半部分。
All you need is to be right.
你所需要的只是正确的。
It's not essential that everyone else be wrong.
不一定其他人都错。
There's room for a little novelty in most kinds of work, but in practice there's a fairly sharp distinction between the kinds of work where it's essential to be independent-minded, and the kinds where it's not.
大多数类型的工作都有一些新奇的空间，但实际上，需要独立思想的工作类型和不需要独立思想的工作类型之间存在相当明显的区别。
I wish someone had told me about this distinction when I was a kid,
我希望当我还是个孩子的时候有人告诉我这个区别
because it's one of the most important things to think about when you're deciding what kind of work you want to do.
因为当您决定要从事什么样的工作时，这是需要考虑的最重要的事情之一。
Do you want to do the kind of work where you can only win by thinking differently from everyone else?
你想做那种只有与其他人不同的思维才能获胜的工作吗？
I suspect most people's unconscious mind will answer that question before their conscious mind has a chance to.
我怀疑大多数人的潜意识会在他们的意识有机会回答之前回答这个问题。
I know mine does.
我知道我的也是这样。
Independent-mindedness seems to be more a matter of nature than
独立思想似乎更多的是一种本性而不是
nurture.
培育。
Which means if you pick the wrong type of work, you're going to be unhappy.
这意味着如果你选择了错误的工作类型，你就会不开心。
If you're naturally independent-minded, you're going to find it frustrating to be a middle manager.
如果你天生具有独立思想，那么你会发现担任中层管理人员很令人沮丧。
And if you're naturally conventional-minded, you're going to be sailing into a headwind if you try to do original research.
如果你天生思想保守，那么当你试图进行原创性研究时，你就会遇到逆风。
One difficulty here, though, is that people are often mistaken about where they fall on the spectrum from conventional- to independent-minded.
然而，这里的一个困难是，人们经常错误地判断自己属于传统型到独立型的范畴。
Conventional-minded people don't like to think of themselves as conventional-minded.
思想传统的人不喜欢认为自己思想传统。
And in any case, it genuinely feels to them as if they make up their own minds about everything.
无论如何，他们真的感觉好像他们对一切都有自己的决定。
It's just a coincidence that their beliefs are identical to their peers'.
他们的信仰与同龄人相同，这只是一个巧合。
And the independent-minded, meanwhile, are often unaware how different their ideas are from conventional ones, at least till they state them publicly.
与此同时，思想独立的人往往意识不到他们的想法与传统想法有多么不同，至少在他们公开表达这些想法之前是这样。