On Think(ing) Better

Hey there — if you’re getting this, you’re either one of my more engaged readers from Win With Data, or you poked around on my Substack profile. For those of you in the former camp, I hope you excuse this intrusion into your inbox, but I figured this might be of interest to you. If not, feel free to move along. 🙂

So with that said, while I usually write about data, I’ve had a lot of time to think about and write about other, [perhaps] more fundamental themes¹ over the years, and I wanted to set up a separate place to give these an outlet.

So what is this? Well, I’ve come to believe that all of our actions come down to two things: the things that you’re inclined to do, biologically, and the patterns of thought that you can layer on top. This is a journey to better understand the former (self-awareness, in short), learn how to affect the latter (mindfulness, in short), all in an effort to compel my brain to generate better ideas. The content here will be a brain dump in that general vicinity.

To clarify, the title of this newsletter — “Think Better” — isn’t a promise of what this newsletter will do for you (of course, I hope it does help some of you think better), but it’s really meant to be a self-directive. I want to think better. Think Better, Robert. And that’s the flavor that this whole experiment will take on. I’ve learned over the years that thoughts that go into other people’s brains often come back different, in a good way. So allow me to be a bit selfish here and use your brain to make mine better.

Your world is not things, but your thoughts about them.

1. Yes, okay, one might argue that data is at the root of everything. But I think you could also make that claim about any number of abstract concepts.