Would You Consider Yourself to be a Thinkist?

I made up a word to describe a phenomenon that’s more important now than ever before.

We can’t really think about anything if we don’t first understand how we think. That has been my fundamental position across nearly every post I’ve written in the past 3 years here on this site:

Whether we’re talking about leadership, business, personal development, humour, or virtually any other topic under the sun, increasing our understanding of our own metacognitive abilities should be (but rarely is) our first step. To think better, we have to think more about thinking.

As I’ve been rereading a lot of my old posts, I’ve seen this theme right from the very beginning. I guess I didn’t see it clearly until it was all laid out in front of me, each post that I’ve written since January 2017.

The theme of becoming better thinkers by understanding our own thought processes, or reengineering our thinking abilities, underlies almost every post that I’ve written.

Interestingly, I also think (ha) that the theme of understanding our own thought processes is more timely now than ever. As we move into ever-more uncertain waters geopolitically, financially, relationally, Socrates’ maxim to “know thyself” is becoming increasingly vital to our successful navigation of the rapids in front of us as a society.

So, I borrowed (and redefined) a term that’s been floating around for a few years, primarily in the fields of modern art and futurism: Thinkist. While those fields have their own meanings for the term, here’s mine:

I chose to append the -ist to this made up word, grammatically correct or not, for a very specific reason: In general, English language conventions dictate that we conjugate the noun form by adding the -er suffix to a word that denotes action (think words like runner, driver, letterer, thinker). We attach the -ist suffix to denote affinity, passion or mastery of a process (think words like theorist, pragmatist…

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