Subconscious Information Processing

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This is the Music Makers podcast where I read things out loud to you and then offer my unqualified opinions on

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Subconscious Information Processing by Fred Wilson. It's Father's Day, and I thought I'd tell a story about my dad and something he taught me a long time ago. I was in middle school, and I had a school project due the next day, and it came up at dinner that I

had not done the project. My dad made me stay up very late that night until

I had completed it, and he stayed up with me. He made sure I understood 2 things that evening. The first one is obvious. When assigned something, you do it, and you do it on time. But the second thing he explained to me was more subtle and way more powerful.

He explained I should start working on a project as soon as it was assigned. An hour or so would do fine, he told me. He told me to come back to the project every day for at least a little bit and make progress on it slowly over time. I asked him why this was better than cramming at the very end as I was doing during the conversation. He explained that once your brain starts working on a problem, it doesn't stop.

If you get your mind wrapped around a problem with a fair bit of time left to solve it, the brain will solve the problem subconsciously over time. And one day, you'll sit down to do some more work on it, and the answer will be right in front of you. I've taken that approach with every big problem I've faced ever since. I used this technique to get through high school, college, and business school. I've used this technique to develop a career in investing in technology.

I've even used this technique to deal with our own parenting challenges. I'm a big fan of subconscious information processing. It is why I have some of my best ideas in the shower in the morning. It is why I write every morning right after I get up. I believe that while I'm sleeping, my mind is churning through the things I'm trying to figure out, and often the answers are back when I wake up.

Thanks, dad, for that tip. It's been a big part of my playbook ever since. Happy Father's Day, everyone. This article could have been called the power of noodling, because what he's talking about here really is noodling on a problem. And I'm not sure that that's a phrase everywhere in the country or even anywhere outside this very house.

So in case noodling isn't a word where you're from, what it means is to mull it over, to to turn it over in your mind, to sit on it for a little while. And that's what Fred Wilson is talking about here. He's talking about getting started on a big problem as soon as possible. And the reason you wanna do that is because you wanna get your gears turning. The subconscious mind is super powerful, but it takes longer to get going than the conscious mind.

Conscious mind, you can just sit down and get to work. Subconscious mind, you don't really control as much, so you need to give it more time to get going. But once it gets going, it's really hard to stop, and so it really will churn through things while you're asleep. And when you wake up, you can have answers. I know this sounds like crazy hocus pocus, but it actually works.

There have been times when I've been working through some seemingly intractable programming problem, thinking about it for days or even weeks, only to have the solution come to me in the middle of the night, literally woken up with the solution in my mind. And then all I have to do is implement it. And sure enough, it works. All of this hard conscious thinking, and I couldn't get there. But all the while, my subconscious was also working on the problem, and it came up with the solution.

I actually use this technique a lot with the podcast. Whatever article it is I'm gonna read on the next episode, I'll pull up about a week before it's time to record, read it, and then spend the week just kinda noodling on it. So when the time comes, all I have to do is think a little bit because the whole week, I've kind of been thinking about it.

I've just been noodling on it, mulling it over so so that

when it's time to record, the pump is already primed. I've already got a lot of good stuff. I just gotta figure out how to put it together. For some reason, though, I don't feel like it's incredibly normal, in this day and age at least, to let things just kinda sit there, to start working on something, and then just to work slow and steady on it. If something's not due for several months or several weeks, we just wait until it's close to the due date, and then we exert all this massive effort to get it done.

When, really, you could have just kind of started a couple of months ago, continued to think about it along the way, and your extremely powerful mind would have churned through a lot of the really hard stuff. And maybe that's a luxury. Maybe not every problem is set up that way. Maybe some problems come up and have to be solved immediately. But, surely, there are some where we can find time to noodle.

Surely, there are some where we can let our subconscious do some of the information processing. And, hopefully, now that you know this technique and this technique has a name, the next time some big project comes up or some hard intractable problem, you'll at least get started and then kinda turn it over in your mind for a long time. I think you'll be really surprised at the results you'll get. The Musicmakers is released every Monday at 9 AM CST. You can find show notes online at musicmakers.fm, or please send me an email and tell me what you think.

Aaron@musicmakers.fm. I would love to hear from you.