Clear thinking

The quality of anything begins with the quality of our thoughts.

The quality of your thoughts shapes the quality of your work. Clear thinking gives you a fighting chance at making something worthwhile.

Shallow thinking produces weak work. It’s weak because it’s boring. Boring because no one spent time sitting with the problem, teasing apart the idea, or refining the execution. Nothing new was unearthed.

Great work demands attention. It’s interesting because there’s something familiar about it, but also surprising to some degree. It makes you want to study the details. Whenever I encounter great work, I have more questions than opinions. I’m deeply curious about how they pulled it off, whether it’s an essay, a company rebrand, a photograph, a film, or a beautiful piece of furniture.

If I feel envy, then I know it’s exceptional.

In my experience, great work feels like a heist. You can’t believe you pulled it off. You’re always looking over your shoulder, waiting for a tasteless executive or “decision-maker” to kill the project. The idea, the pitch, the team—it all came together. In 14 years, I’ve felt that three, maybe four times.

Rigorous, imaginative, clear thinking is rare.

And I believe it starts with writing.

David McCullough said it best: “Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.” If you can’t write your idea down, present it, or tell a story about it—you need someone nearby who can.

Can’t everyone think?

There’s a scene from Peaky Blinders I always come back to. Two brothers lead the family: Arthur Shelby is loud, drunk, and violent. Tommy Shelby is quiet, calculated, and equally dangerous. At first, it’s unclear who’s in charge. But in moments of chaos, Tommy rises. He sees the moves others miss.

At one point, Arthur panics and yells. Tommy stays calm and simply says:

“I think. That’s what I do.

I think, so that you don’t have to.”

I also empathize with the opposite side. Imagine you are in Arthur’s position, at your job. The ego would be hurt. “What do you mean I can’t think?" I have thoughts and ideas!”

"Two percent of the people think; three percent think they think; and ninety-five percent would rather die than think," said George Bernard Shaw.

The objective measure of whether someone is good at thinking is through writing or presenting. You probably don’t know what you’re talking about if you can't write something that moves people. And if you can’t present your vision, you didn’t think it through, or lack the confidence to own it.

Many companies fail because they don’t have a Tommy. The thinking is left to people with titles, not talent or proof that they know how to think imaginatively and strategically.

Everyone can write a sentence, but few can take a stand. Few can paint a picture vivid enough for others to see. The real struggle is having a point of view and the courage to back it up and to stand for something.

Clear thinking moves people by giving them the words they felt but couldn’t develop independently. That’s power. Clear thinking doesn’t just lend words and vision but sparks a motivation to pursue one idea instead of another.

Tools can’t think for you

These days, I see people outsourcing critical thinking. They binge podcasts. They mimic the thinking of a VP or CMO. They adopt frameworks and assume it’s a strategy. But frameworks don’t think for you. The person who created the framework thought deeply. The person copying it often hasn’t.

Most frameworks, especially those in my industry of B2B SaaS, are just microwavable, empty food. They’re the Hungry Man for the Talentless. They were born from the ZIRP era, prioritizing speed and metrics over quality and love. While some companies succeeded in using these playbooks, they failed to become a long-term strategy.

Here’s a box. Type in some words. Voila—your magical positioning statement, even though half your exec team can’t write a clear sentence. Here’s your roadmap framework. Toss it on a slide and make it look like progress. And somehow, these tactics are celebrated.

It’s nonsense.

The number of times I dealt with people who made three times more than I did but couldn’t string two words together to form a coherent thought makes you want to pull out your hair. In rotting bureaucratic organizations, the shallow thinking of the higher-ups is often permitted, which becomes the roadmap and goals, leading entire teams to weak outcomes. You reach a point in your career where you realize that every company, to some degree, is a massive shitshow. Once you get into certain rooms, believing that the adults are in there and thinking clearly, you quickly realize how naive you’ve been. The world operates on Default Chaos.

Clear thinking is threatening. It exposes bad ideas and incompetence. Your boss or the exec team often won’t see your clarity as an asset. They’ll see it as a threat. That’s happened to me more than once in my career.

Now, with the rise of AI, this will get worse. Tools can generate prose that sounds coherent. It will spit out something that smells okay. But most people don’t have the taste to know if it’s good, or if it says anything at all.

That’s the difference between thinking and having thoughts. Everyone has thoughts; the mind conjures them without us wanting it to. However, thinking is different because it forces an outcome, an artifact others can read or experience. They are changed by it.

Clear thinking is earned. Once you have clarity, confidence ensues. Clarity and confidence can enroll people in your vision. That’s what leaders do. They think clearly and tell compelling stories.

Clear thinking

Whenever a designer asks me for career advice, I always say the same thing: learn to fucking write. It’s not pushing pixels that will set you apart, but the ability to think critically, imaginatively, expansively, and strategically.

Writing to think is a sharpening stone for your creativity. It will help you see the world clearly, and seeing is not something everyone does.

Clear thinking is hard because it’s humbling. It forces you to admit what you don’t know. That’s why reading outside your domain is essential. It widens your field of vision. It sharpens your pattern recognition. You stop recycling the same stale ideas.

I think of Michelangelo:

“Every block of stone has a statue inside it... I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

Clear thinking is carving. It’s the slow removal of noise, excess, and cruft. Every creative person's job is to carve their idea to its essence. To be able to communicate it so succinctly that nothing is lost and everything is felt.

Strong ideas have an immutable core. You can’t cut any deeper. You’re left with the thing itself.

Writing sharpens your thinking. Thinking reveals your taste. Taste shapes your decisions. And decisions shape the world.

If you want to make better work, start by thinking better.

And if you want to think better, start by writing.