Building A Thinking Life

Our final part in the series on going from being a consumer to a thinker

Photo by Chris Hardy on Unsplash

I have always admired reading about the lives of some of my favorite authors, thinkers, and people across history who have made an impact on the world through the process of reading and thinking. The ones who are my heroes are the ones who take ideas from books and are able to put those ideas into actions and make an impact on the world. People such as C.S. Lewis, Teddy Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, and Frederick Douglass are those who I admire for their reading and thinking lives but also the impact they have made on the world. But none of those lives happened without having a deep life that eliminated distraction, went from consuming books to actually thinking through ideas, and were able to turn those ideas into writing, building lives around them, and impacting the world at large in the process.

When you study the lives of some of these men and women, patterns begin to emerge. These people may not have been around in our current internet and technologically distracted age but they had surface level distractions of their own times and were able to train their focus to go deeper in their reading and thinking. They were intentional about eliminating surface level consumption and building a life around deep ideas.

Here are a few of the patterns that emerge and can deepen your life:

1. Make reading and thinking deeply a priority in your life.

The best way to build a thinking life is to add it into your calendar. Set aside time for the process or reading, annotating, note making, and writing and protect this time. For me this is every morning. I wake up early to have time alone with books, thoughts, and writing. I rarely miss a morning and this has allowed me to read hundreds of books over the past several years, learning how to take notes, and beginning a writing practice. Read and Think Deeply has been around since 2024 but the process started years before then as I practiced the process I have laid out in this series.

For you, daily might be too much to start with. You may want to start smaller. This could be 3-4 days per week and only twenty minute sessions. Everyone is at a different place in their season of life, but there are no short cuts in the process.

2. Protect your attention by decreasing consumption.

It is no secret that our attention spans are shrinking as our lives are ruled by our phones, scrolling reels, quick and controversial takes online. But your attention span is capable of being trained for longer periods of deeper thinking and reading sessions. It just takes some training for your brain.

For me, I have noticed when I have social media apps on my phone, I am pulled into scrolling and that takes away time from reading and thinking and also makes it harder to focus on reading when I do try to turn my attention to books. Especially when it comes to reading older books. Classics were mostly written in a time before social media and scrolling when people were used to longer forms of entertainment or trains of thought.

If you want to build a thinking life, you have to be mindful of the way your brain is consuming content and direct it towards more valuable content. For me, this is through reading books. Books require somewhere from 6-20+ hours to read and require you to sit with characters, stories, and arguments. This is a different type of consumption that requires training.

3. Go for walks.

This is more important than it seems on the surface and may require its own newsletter at some point. Going for walks, especially outside in nature without earbuds or artificial noise in our ears is good for your brain as well as nourishing to your soul. I try to walk most mornings after my reading sessions and as soon as I walk out the door, the sounds of birds fill my ears. My heart rate seems to drop. My brain goes into a different mode and feels less cluttered.

Not only good for your health, walks give you a chance to let your mind wander. As if your brain is happy to take a walk too. I spend this time thinking about what I just read, connecting to other books I have read, praying while walking, and generally just giving myself permission to let my mind process what it is pulled to. Contrast this with being online where our minds are consuming content and being told what to think and bombarded with information. Walking is calm even when our brains are active.

4. Give yourself time with your thoughts.

In addition to walking without consuming, give yourself time alone with your thoughts. I remember growing up in the 90s, spending hours a day dreaming and thinking. This was before the internet was really a thing. Time felt different back in those days and my mind felt less cluttered. Of course this was when I was young and had less responsibilities but time alone with your thoughts is very underrated and does not typically show up on lists of how to be productive.

Just as you train your muscles to an endurance event, your mind must be trained to spend time thinking, wandering, and not consuming. This could be with a notebook by your side to jot down ideas or not. The key is to allow your mind to process the day, the reading session, and to catch up from the pace of life and the demands placed on it.

5. Find other readers and thinkers.

Any endeavor worth doing is better with others. If you try to do this on your own, but everyone else in your life is consuming away, speaking in memes, scrolling their phones, you will feel like you are on an island. A reading and thinking life is better when shared with others. Find likeminded people, even if it starts online at first and talk about books, ideas, and the slow life. Talking about books and ideas with other readers and thinkers helps to solidify your thinking and gives you new perspectives than your own on books and ideas.

Part of the mission of Read and Think Deeply is to help others that love to read and think like myself find their way and build the kind of reading and thinking life they desire. It is to let you know that you are not alone. You may not be as lucky as finding your own Inklings but maybe 1-2 other readers and thinkers to encourage you and grow together. Without Lewis, Tolkien may have never finished The Lord of the Rings and without Tolkien we would not have all the great writings by Lewis.

As we wrap up our series on how to go from being a consumer of books and media to reading and thinking deeply, remember to be kind to yourself. This is meant to be a lifelong process and this is not something that is going to show up on TikTok or social media. We are not taught how to have deep lives and this is something that takes some trial and error. But if you want to become a deep person who seeks truth and wisdom, there are not any shortcuts to the process. It takes focused work and moving beyond consumption to developing a reading and thinking life that is built one book, writing session, commonplace note at a time.

What are some other ways you have found to help build a reading and thinking life?

In case you missed the rest of the series:

Part 1 How To Move From Consuming Books to Thinking Deeply

Part 2 How To Take Notes As You Read

Part 3 My Writing and Reading Journaling System

Part 4 How To Organize Your Thoughts for Writing

Part 5 How To Write Summaries and Reviews of Books