There are broadly two categories of knowledge - a priori and a posteriori. A priori is knowledge from reasoning. A posteriori is knowledge from sensory observation. When people talk, I suspect most of their knowledge comes from a posteriori. As a result, we have the old adage that people don't remember what you say, but how you make them feel.
Yet few of us spend a lot of time thinking deeply about a priori - trying to understand fundamental truths. I suspect that in most human experiences, there is no such thing as fundamental truth. But we can still break open the deep-seated beliefs that drive our actions and thought processes.
For the longest time, I believed in the importance of talking simpler. You hear this from Feynman, from Dimon, from people in all walks of life . Yet as a result of talking simpler, I suspect I started thinking simpler. It made me overdeterministic in my thought process, finding plausible reasons behind my actions, my past success and failures. It wasn’t until reading The Brothers Karamazov that I started to deeply question myself—unravelling the complexity of human biases, noise, and the contradictions that exist in our minds.
The shift that followed was fundamental. I now try to speak simpler, but think more complexly. I try to hold two opposing thoughts in my mind at once. At the end of the day, to do well is to articulate well. But articulating well has to be in conjunction with thinking hard.