Thinking Foundations · Lesson 4 of 4
Metacognition: thinking about your thinking
Writing your reasoning down is what makes it reviewable. Memory quietly improves your past reasoning for you.
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Metacognition is the habit of watching your own reasoning while it runs. Not judging it — watching it. Noticing that you have already decided and are now looking for reasons. Noticing that you are confident and cannot say why. Noticing that you changed your position and did not register that you had.
It is the skill that makes every other skill on this page improve, because it is what lets you catch a move in progress rather than diagnosing it afterwards from the wreckage.
It is also the reason this section asks you to write things down. A thought you keep in your head is remembered as having been better than it was. A thought on paper can be read back by a person who now knows what happened next — and that person is you.
See it happen
Six months ago you picked one of two contractors. It went badly, and you are explaining it to someone now.
- The read that arrives on its own
- "I knew there was something off about them. I should have trusted my gut."
- The same situation, with this idea
- You open the note you wrote at the time: "Going with B, mainly because they can start Monday." There is no unease in it. Speed was the reason — and speed is what you would weigh differently now.
- What changed
- Memory had quietly upgraded the decision into a better one that got overruled. The note is the only reason you know that, and it is why writing it down is the lesson.
The takeaway
Writing your reasoning down is what makes it reviewable. Memory quietly improves your past reasoning for you.
Easy to take the wrong way
Writing the note after the outcome is known. It has to be written while you still do not know, or it records a conclusion rather than a reason.
Try this
Before your next decision, write one sentence: "I am about to decide X, mainly because Y." Read it again in a month.