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Leitura de 13 min

Applying Systems Thinking for Better Thoughts

Summary

In this episode of Developer Tea, host Jonathan Cottrell delves into the profound impact that the quality of our thoughts has on our experience of reality. He emphasizes that while we cannot directly control every thought that arises, we can influence the systems that produce them. This meta-cognitive approach is key to personal improvement.

Cottrell introduces the basics of systems thinking, breaking it down into core components: stocks, flows, and variables. He then applies this framework to our mental habits, suggesting we model activities like exercise, social media consumption, and reading as ‘stocks’ that influence the ‘flow’ of healthy versus unhealthy thoughts. The goal is not to suppress unwanted thoughts but to design an environment conducive to better thought patterns.

He cautions against simplistic optimization, noting that the optimal time for any activity is not necessarily maximized. The real value lies in the awareness gained by asking questions about how our time investments affect our mental output. This process of ‘thinking about thinking’ allows for continuous refinement based on introspection and behavioral science.

The episode concludes by framing this systems-thinking exercise as a design opportunity. By consciously examining and adjusting the contexts from which our thoughts emerge, we can move from a haphazard mental environment to one that is intentionally crafted for improvement, unlocking potential we might otherwise miss.

Recommendations

Communities

  • Developer Tea Discord — Listeners are encouraged to join the free Developer Tea Discord community for further discussion.

Tools

  • Square APIs and SDKs — Mentioned as the episode sponsor, Square offers free APIs and SDKs for developers to build custom tools and integrations for the millions of sellers using Square’s platform.

Topic Timeline

  • 00:00:00 — Introduction to the importance of thought quality — Jonathan Cottrell introduces the episode’s theme: the ability to think about our thoughts is a crucial human tool for improvement. He references Marcus Aurelius to illustrate how thoughts color our perception and experience of reality, while clarifying this is not about ‘positive thinking’ magically solving problems.
  • 00:01:35 — The core idea: changing systems that produce thoughts — Cottrell presents the episode’s two key parts: first, acknowledging the impact of thought quality on life, and second, the actionable insight that we can change the systems that produce our thoughts. He adds a disclaimer about his non-professional background and notes we are focusing on contexts within our control.
  • 00:02:42 — Explaining systems thinking: stocks, flows, variables — The host explains the ‘extremely dumbed down’ version of systems thinking, defining its core pieces: stocks (accumulated value), flows (inputs/outputs to stocks), and variables (factors affecting rates). He promises to make these abstract concepts concrete and practical for the episode’s purpose.
  • 00:04:51 — Applying systems thinking to thought patterns — After a sponsor break, Cottrell applies systems thinking to our habits and thought patterns. He argues we shouldn’t try to control raw thoughts (incoming flow), but instead create systems conducive to dealing with unwanted thoughts and fostering desirable ones. He proposes a simple model with three example stocks: exercise, social media, and reading.
  • 00:08:03 — Building a personal model and asking key questions — Cottrell guides listeners to introspectively build their own system model, asking questions like ‘What level of positive effect does consuming social media have on my healthy thoughts?’ He suggests this modeling can encourage reallocating time from less beneficial activities (social media) to more beneficial ones (exercise, reading).
  • 00:08:54 — Cautions against naive optimization and the value of awareness — The host cautions that a naive model might suggest extreme allocations (e.g., 24 hours of exercise). The optimal amount of an activity like social media may not be zero. The critical point is that becoming aware of the action-reaction loop in thought production is itself the valuable meta-thinking exercise that allows for ongoing refinement and learning.
  • 00:10:26 — Conclusion: Designing your thought environment — Cottrell concludes that this process is about designing the context from which thoughts arise. The alternative is being subject to a haphazard, undesigned environment. While not necessarily unhealthy, such an environment likely presents an untapped opportunity for improvement through conscious systems thinking.

Episode Info

  • Podcast: Developer Tea
  • Author: Jonathan Cutrell
  • Category: Technology Business Careers Society & Culture
  • Published: 2022-07-13T07:00:00Z
  • Duration: 00:11:41

References

Podcast Info

Transcript

[00:00:00] Perhaps the most important tool that you have as a human being, what sets you

[00:00:15] apart and gives you the opportunity to improve is the ability to inspect the

[00:00:22] ability to think about your thoughts.

[00:00:27] That’s what we’re talking about in today’s episode. My name is Jonathan

[00:00:31] Cottrell and you’re listening to Developer Tea. So much of your experience

[00:00:37] and so many of your actions are dependent on the quality of your

[00:00:42] thoughts. This is not a new concept, Marcus Aurelius said it this way, that

[00:00:48] your soul becomes dyed the color of your thoughts. Your thoughts drive so much

[00:00:54] about your perception and your perception drives so much about how you

[00:01:00] experience reality. Now this doesn’t mean that your positive thoughts are going

[00:01:07] to land money in your pocket. We’re gonna reject that outright before we get down

[00:01:12] this road, but instead what I want to adopt, what I want you to adopt, what I

[00:01:18] want you to consider is two parts. First, what we’ve already said, that thoughts

[00:01:24] are important, that the quality of your thoughts has a profound impact on the

[00:01:30] quality of your life and your experience of reality. The second thing I want you

[00:01:35] to grasp today is that you can change the systems that produce thoughts. You

[00:01:45] can affect the systems that produce your thoughts. Now I do want to make a

[00:01:52] disclaimer here before we get down the road and that disclaimer is very simple.

[00:01:56] I am not a professional when it comes to neuroscience. I’m certainly not a

[00:02:01] professional when it comes to neurodivergence and so everything I’m

[00:02:05] saying here should be taken with a grain of salt. Everybody’s experience is

[00:02:09] different and all of the systems that produce your thoughts are not

[00:02:13] necessarily directly in your control. We would be absolutely incorrect to assume

[00:02:19] that that would be the case and in fact many of the systems for all of us are

[00:02:23] out of our direct control. So the context that we’re talking about in this episode

[00:02:30] is the context that you do have control over. Whatever context that is for you

[00:02:36] might be different than the next person. We’re gonna do a little bit of systems

[00:02:42] thinking in today’s episode and then we’re going to apply that systems

[00:02:46] thinking to our systems of thought. These are two different concepts. Systems

[00:02:52] thinking is really just that meta level analysis. What is going on to produce

[00:02:57] the thoughts that I’m having and then the second piece of that is actually

[00:03:02] applying that to your particular scenario. So let’s talk a little bit about

[00:03:08] systems thinking. The very extremely dumbed down version of systems thinking

[00:03:14] involves some core pieces. These are the stock, the flow and variables. Stocks,

[00:03:22] flows and variables. You can think about stocks as something that would

[00:03:27] accumulate some kind of material or some kind of value, a bucket and then you can

[00:03:33] think about flows as something that is either going into or out of a stock.

[00:03:38] Flows of course can have different rates and different things might affect those

[00:03:44] rates. The rate of something else may affect that rate or a variable may

[00:03:49] affect that rate. So these may seem like abstract concepts but we’re gonna make

[00:03:55] them as concrete and practical as we can in this episode. But first, let’s talk about today’s sponsor.

[00:04:07] This episode of Developer Tea is brought to you by Square. There are millions of

[00:04:11] sellers across the globe using Square to run every aspect of their business. Many

[00:04:15] of those sellers are looking for customized solutions that are deeply

[00:04:19] connected and easy to use. The problem is they’d have to go and hire a developer

[00:04:23] to custom build that for them usually. Well this is where you as a developer

[00:04:27] come in. You can grow your business by extending or integrating with Square

[00:04:31] using their free APIs and SDKs to build tools for sellers. Learn more by going to

[00:04:37] developertea.com slash Square. That’s developertea.com slash Square. Thanks again to Square for sponsoring today’s episode of Developer Tea.

[00:04:51] Let’s talk a little bit about how systems thinking can apply to our way of thinking, our

[00:04:59] habits and thought patterns themselves. This meta thinking can help you improve

[00:05:07] your systems that trigger various types of thoughts. Something you may not expect

[00:05:14] is that the thoughts themselves are not what we’re trying to change. When you have

[00:05:22] a raw thought, you can think about this as incoming flow. This is something that

[00:05:28] we can’t really control and in fact if we tried to control it we might actually

[00:05:33] have a negative feedback loop causing more of the same types of thoughts.

[00:05:38] Instead what we want to do is create situations that are conducive to, number

[00:05:43] one, dealing with the kinds of thoughts that we don’t necessarily want to act on

[00:05:48] or that we don’t necessarily want to multiply and secondly creating a system

[00:05:55] that is conducive to better thought patterns and thoughts that we do want to

[00:06:02] act on. For the sake of the exercise we’re going to make this extremely simple

[00:06:06] and of course your actual systems of thought are much more likely to be more

[00:06:12] complex than this but let’s imagine that we have three stocks, three stocks that

[00:06:18] we’re going to have varying amounts of unitless value. We’ll call this time

[00:06:23] spent on these stocks and the variable in the system is what percentage of time

[00:06:30] you’re going to spend investing in each of these stocks. The first one is

[00:06:34] exercise, the second one is social media consumption and the third one is reading

[00:06:40] books. Now you can imagine adding many more of these, all of the different things

[00:06:45] that you spend your time on, maybe spending time with a close friend or

[00:06:49] spending time with a mentor. You might add sleep as another bucket here, right?

[00:06:55] So there’s a lot of things that you could model out but we’re going to focus on

[00:06:59] these three, spending time with social media, spending time reading books and

[00:07:03] then spending time exercising. And we can imagine these stocks can act as kind of

[00:07:09] secondary variables to another set of flows. Those flows might be positive

[00:07:17] thoughts or healthy thoughts and another kind of and we’re being very binary here

[00:07:23] of course there’s a lot more that could go into this but healthy thoughts and

[00:07:26] unhealthy thoughts, right? These are thoughts that are useful or desired and

[00:07:32] then thoughts that are not useful or not desired. It’s important to recognize

[00:07:37] that without hard data it’s hard to build a proper system, one that actually

[00:07:43] represents a true reality and so building system models that are kind of

[00:07:49] representing these abstract concepts that are very personal to you requires

[00:07:53] some introspection, it requires some guessing. This is not a pure science

[00:07:58] rather it’s a way of thinking about these different inputs more clearly. So

[00:08:03] you can imagine asking yourself what level of positive effect does consuming

[00:08:09] social media have on my healthy thoughts? This is a very kind of important

[00:08:16] question that is only really examined if you think about this system. What level

[00:08:22] of positive effect does consuming social media have on the rate of healthy,

[00:08:30] desirable, positive thoughts? And if you ask this question about exercise, you

[00:08:37] ask this question about reading a book, you could probably come up with a model

[00:08:41] that hopefully encourages you to spend a little less time on social media and

[00:08:47] instead allocate that same time towards more exercise or reading a book. Now I do

[00:08:54] want to provide a word of caution and that is that in a naive version of this

[00:08:59] model the optimal amount of time exercising might be 24 hours a day or the

[00:09:05] optimal amount of time spent reading a book might be 24 hours a day or you’re

[00:09:10] supposed to spend 12 hours reading and 12 hours exercising, right? This is

[00:09:14] obviously not optimal for real health and in fact the optimal amount of social

[00:09:19] media may not actually be zero. Here’s the important point that I’m trying to

[00:09:24] make with this. By becoming aware of the systems that produce thought, by

[00:09:32] becoming aware of that kind of action-reaction loop, by becoming aware of

[00:09:39] where you are putting your time or your effort in your life, what kinds of stocks

[00:09:45] are you trying to stockpile, if you begin to ask these questions then you are

[00:09:51] doing the critical exercise of that meta-thinking. You are thinking about

[00:09:57] your thinking, you are thinking about the system that produces thoughts. Over

[00:10:04] time you can refine these systems, you begin to learn more about yourself. Try

[00:10:09] to take an outside view, try to inform your systems modeling or your

[00:10:14] thinking about thinking based off of behavioral science and based off of the

[00:10:19] best available information. This is a way of designing the context where your

[00:10:26] thoughts arise from and the alternative here, if you don’t do this, if you don’t

[00:10:32] spend the time thinking about thinking, then you’ll be subject to thinking in

[00:10:37] an environment that is not designed and in an environment that’s haphazard.

[00:10:42] This doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily unhealthy, but it does mean that it’s

[00:10:47] very likely that you have an opportunity sitting in front of you, an

[00:10:52] opportunity to improve. Thanks so much for listening to today’s episode of

[00:10:57] Developer T. Thanks again to today’s sponsor Square. Head over to

[00:11:01] developert.com slash Square to get started with the SDKs and APIs that Square

[00:11:06] has provided for free for you to go and make money by selling awesome

[00:11:11] integrations to the millions of sellers that use Square worldwide. Thanks so much

[00:11:15] for listening to this episode. If you enjoyed this discussion, I encourage you to

[00:11:19] join the Developer T Discord community. Head over to developert.com slash

[00:11:23] Discord to join that today. It’s totally free. Thanks so much and until next time,

[00:11:28] enjoy your tea.

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