On a flight from Los Angeles to New York in 1965, my seatmate was Broadway lyricist and producer Alan Jay Lerner. My most vivid recollection of our wide-ranging conversation was his answer to a question about why he thought so many of his shows were great hits. He said that the brain was like a muscle. If you don’t use it enough, it becomes soft and weak. If you use it properly, it becomes firm and strong. But if you overuse it and it becomes muscle-bound, you should relax it so that you can continue to think creatively. I could see how a man with such a disciplined, sensitive mind could create the sure hit he had just finished, which was appropriately titled On a Clear Day, You Can See Forever.
Thinking is the most important and least exercised of man’s faculties. Because it is the hardest of his activities, a person will go to the greatest lengths to avoid it.
The language abounds with sayings about thinking. You think on your feet, you think things through, you talk without thinking, you think out loud, you are too busy to think, you put on your thinking cap. Like the weather, everybody talks about thinking, but too few do anything about it, especially these days.
One of the culprits is television. It has enriched life for millions, particularly shut-ins whose only world is what they see on television. But watching television does not exercise the brain. A heart specialist will tell you that walking downstairs is passive exercise, while walking upstairs gives the heart the exercise it needs. For the brain, reading or conversation is like walking upstairs, because they engage and exercise the brain. Watching TV is like taking the elevator.
But to criticize television as a passive medium does not begin to describe the active harm it is doing to our society. Computer specialists have a saying—“Garbage in, garbage out”—which they use when they want to make the point that a computer is only a mechanism for processing information, not creating it. The same principle applies to television. Young people used to learn their lessons from McGuffey’s Readers; the baby-boomers learned them from the Beaver and Gilligan. As the postwar generation came of age, it spawned a new generation of TV programmers, who in turn have put more triviality, sex, violence, and bad manners on the air than anyone ever thought possible. Trash TV could only have been created by people who were raised on the tube. Garbage in, garbage out.
I know I am in a minority even in my own family when I say that computers themselves are another culprit in the decline of thinking. I am too old to understand the things, but my grandchildren can’t spend the day without them. When I took math in school, we used slide rules for the same calculations today’s students solve with electronic calculators. In learning to use the slide rule, we learned something about the interaction of numbers that calculators cannot teach. The way things are going, computers will soon be doing so much for us that the only thinking that will be required will be by those who build and program them. I know the standard reply is that the computer only does routine tasks, freeing the mind for more creative thinking. It is certainly much better for a secretary who has to change a couple of words on a page to put it through a word processor in a few seconds than to have to type over the whole page. What we should bear in mind, however, is that we should always use a computer as an aid to thinking rather than a substitute for it.
Thinking is particularly vital for politicians, whose statements, whether thought through or not, can have enormous consequences both for themselves and their people. As de Gaulle observed, “Great men of action have always been of the meditative type. They have without exception possessed to a very high degree the power of withdrawing to themselves.” Too often in politics, the man of thought cannot act, and the man of action does not think. The ideal is one such as Woodrow Wilson, who was a creative thinker and, when still at his best, a decisive man of action. Politicians should follow the advice of Henri Bergson: “Act as men of thought. Think as men of action.”
Because thinking is such an individualistic faculty, there are no general rules for how, where, when, or what a person should think. Churchill apparently did some of his best thinking while dictating his great speeches. When he visited Washington in 1954, I asked him if he had ever considered using a Dictaphone. He replied that an American friend had given him one of those “machines,” but that he preferred to dictate to a pretty secretary. I asked Brezhnev that same question when I saw him in the Kremlin in 1974 and got exactly the same answer—with an earthy postscript. “When you wake up in the middle of the night and want to make a note,” he said, “it is very convenient to have someone in the room with you to take it down.”
When I visited Paul Getty at his home near London in 1965, his secretary told me that every afternoon he had a custom of sitting in his library alone for a solid hour during which he read nothing, made no telephone calls, and made no notes. Instead, he just thought. Then he would get up and place a phone call or two which might add several hundred million dollars to his estate. I don’t know if that is a sure way to become a billionaire, but it would be worth a try.
While some people need solitude for creative thought, others’ minds seem to thrive in the midst of chaos. I marvel at how newspaper reporters can think with their fingers on a typewriter or computer on a crowded campaign bus or in a noisy city newsroom. I’m told the wire service rewrite man is a dying breed. These highly specialized journalists, who hook a phone over their ears and type out a final draft of a hot news story from raw data called in by a reporter, have to be the most highly qualified, underpaid people in the business.
The great leaders I have known always used every opportunity to think before commenting on a question. Although neither de Gaulle nor Chou En-lai ever spoke English in their talks with me, I know they understood a great deal of it. But neither ever interrupted when the interpreter was translating what I was saying into French or Chinese. Even though they knew what I had said or had a pretty good idea, by letting the interpreter repeat it, they bought time to think.
Some think better at night, others in the early morning. Some prefer a large room, others a small one. Some think on a typewriter or word processor; others prefer a pencil or pen. The critical element is not how but when. The irony of life in the fast lane—in politics, business, or in any other field—is that brilliant, powerful people who could benefit the most from creative thought are the ones who have the least time for it.
Recognizing that what works for one person may not for another, these are some of the procedures that work best for me.
I prefer a small office to a large one, and particularly one that provides no temptation for diversion. If there is a window with a good view, I sit with my back to it.
I have always insisted, even in the White House years, that my staff provide time in the schedule for thinking. For a major speech or press conference, I insisted on two or three days. And even after a speech had been prepared, I set aside at least an hour of free time before the appearance to get my thoughts together and get up for the delivery. It was especially hard to do this in the White House and on campaigns, when aides saw every blank space on the schedule as a potential stroking session with a state party chairman or interview with a local anchorman.
Even when there was no speech or other appearance to prepare for, I always tried to reserve an hour or two a day for thinking. Some of the best ideas come when you are not focusing on a specific subject. In my case, I find that reading is the best use of that time. I am not a speed reader. For me, reading is like eating. To digest it, you have to chew it well. My reading may not provide specific ideas for whatever I am working on at the time. In fact, it is sometimes better to read in an area that is different from the subject of your current preoccupation. Later, when you are working on something specific, an idea will pop into your head from your reading. Reading also is indispensable for providing perspective, so that when you tackle a specific problem you will think broadly and not narrowly, deeply and not superficially. Most of the great leaders I have met—Churchill, de Gaulle, de Gasperi, Menzies, Yoshida, Mao Tse-tung, Chou En-lai—were prolific readers. Each of these men was a far-sighted strategic thinker not because he inherited that trait but as the result of his habits of reading and contemplation.
There are many sources of information for a leader, including books, articles, briefing papers, and conversations. The way he ingests his food for thought depends on the subject and his own tastes. Some like to bat ideas around with aides over lunch. But I generally preferred to get analysis from others in writing, not because I disliked the fellowship but because I tried not to mix fellowship with work. Besides, most smart people express themselves better in writing than orally. You also tend to be more precise and less glib in your analysis if you are forced to commit it to paper.
On those occasions when I do decide to absorb other people’s thoughts in conversation, I find that conversations with a group are not as useful as a dialogue with one person for stimulating creative thinking. And such a conversation is useful only in the research phase of decision making. When it comes time to decide, there is no substitute for sitting alone and thinking the problem through. What works best for me is to list all of the ideas that relate to the subject I must act on and then organize the material in an orderly way. If you have not put your own thoughts in order, you will be unable to convince others to do so. I make at least four outlines for every major speech or question-and-answer session. A single critical sentence can require two or three hours of concentrated thought to frame and hone.
When you run into a roadblock in trying to put your thoughts in order, think around it rather than through it. Or this may be the time for a break—a cup of coffee, a short walk, a look out the window, a bit of reading from a good book. But you must be careful to use these breaks to improve your thinking rather than as an excuse to avoid it.
It is important not to become brain-tired, or as Lerner put it, muscle-bound. Ironically, however, sometimes you do your best thinking when you are the most tired. I had my first and only White House press conference as Vice President after Eisenhower suffered his stroke. It was a difficult period, and I was so tired that I was worried I had not been up to par. Frank Stanton, the president of CBS, called me later that day and told me he was sending me a recording of the conference, because he thought it was the best I had ever had.
When I told him of my concern, he said that a person was at his best on radio or television when he was physically tired. Because of the awareness of fatigue, we raise the level of concentration to compensate. It is something like a sinker-ball pitcher in baseball. If he is too fresh, he puts too much on the ball, and it doesn’t sink.
Worrying is not thinking. This does not mean that you should be blithely optimistic and unaware of the seriousness of your problem. But worrying about things you can’t do anything about is a waste of time. After I ordered the attacks on the Communist-occupied sanctuaries in Cambodia in 1970, there were violent demonstrations against my action across the nation. Some of my staff members wondered aloud whether we had made the right decision. I always put a stop to that kind of Monday morning quarterbacking by saying, “Remember Lot’s wife. Don’t look back.” In that case, I was confident I had made the right decision. But whether you are right or wrong, when you worry about the past, you cannot think about the problems you face in the present and future.
There is nothing more exhausting than thinking. I have been more physically tired after two hours of concentrated study than after shaking a thousand people’s hands in two hours or making fifteen whistle-stop speeches in a day of campaigning. Because thinking is so tiring, we rebel at it and look for excuses not to do it. But the rewards are worth it.
There is no greater exhilaration than the sense of accomplishment you feel after making a decision based on careful, intense thought. In the end, thinking provides the inner peace and serenity necessary for decisive and effective action.