Thinking Is a Skill

I had just turned 40, and for the very first time I heard the expression, “Thinking is a skill.”

I thought, “If thinking is a skill, then how come no one ever mentioned it to me?”

My parents never mentioned it. My high school never mentioned it. My college never mentioned it. My professional development seminars never mentioned it. The books I read never mentioned it.

Perhaps it was obvious to others that thinking is a skill, but it wasn’t obvious to me. I thought thinking was different from activities that were obviously skill-based like sports. It was obvious to me that athletes like Lebron James had to learn basketball skills-and practice them-in order to get better at basketball. But I’d always looked at intelligent people like Paul Graham and thought that they were born thinkers. It never occurred to me that they might have learned and practiced how to think. But when I heard thinking was a skill, I realized the people I admired acquired thinking skills in much the same way I’d seen athletes acquiring athletic skills.

I felt like an idiot. For years I’d never made the connection between thinking and other skills.

For the next few weeks, I began thinking this through. If thinking is a skill, I thought, then it must be analogous to other skills. Skills in general have these features: