Wang Xing
Avoiding the real thinking
The illusion of diligence
Wang Xing's posts on Fanfou
One line he wrote on a microblog is quoted more than anything else he has said. How busyness became a substitute for thought.
What actually happened?
The most quoted thing Wang Xing has written is a line from Fanfou: most people will do anything rather than face real thinking. The blade is in anything, which includes overtime, meetings, research and retrospectives, the activities that most resemble thought. Real thinking points at uncomfortable questions. Should this be done at all? Does the premise still hold? What would we choose starting over? A full calendar is a perfect reason not to answer them. Another of his lines works as a footnote: no clinging to what is past, go forward with everything.
Busyness is the most respectable form of avoidance
Avoiding by scrolling produces guilt; avoiding by working late produces applause, which makes it far harder to quit. The tell is a mismatch between the activity and the question: the real question is direction and people optimise execution, the real question is whether and people debate how.
A project whose premise has already shifted enters its most industrious phase: polish, process, detailed weeklies. Everyone is voting with effort not to ask the question.
Real thinking leaves something behind
To separate thinking from activities named after thinking, look at the output. Real thinking produces a judgement that could be overturned: a premise written down, a trade-off quantified, a thing explicitly given up. Three hours of meeting that produced nothing capable of being wrong was socialising.
Search the minutes for one sentence of the form: we believe X, and if Y happens this is void. A meeting without that shape never thought.
Put the uncomfortable questions on the calendar
What gets avoided is always the same short list, so the fix can be mechanical. Write them down and force an answer on a schedule: what should we stop, which premise is shakiest, would we start this from zero today? Thinking cannot wait for inspiration, it needs a slot it cannot escape.
Half a day each quarter, everyone answering three uncomfortable questions, execution banned from the room. That half-day often outearns the quarter's diligence.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: you or the team are in an unusually busy, unusually full stretch.
Ask first: which question are we avoiding, and when did we last produce a judgement that could be proved wrong?
Where it goes wrong: using the line to sneer at all execution, when after it is clear diligence is the whole job; or turning real thinking into permanent abstraction with no output at all.
Lines to keep
No clinging to what is past; go forward with everything.
The more confident about the future, the more patient about now.
Same situation, other people are asking
My calendar is full and none of it is mine.The same task costs me more than it costs everyone else.I finished nothing today and I'm too tired to speak.I gave these years to the work and the friendships went quiet.Too busy to have a life · all 7 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.