What We Inherit

I wasn't particularly interested in school, despite occasionally convincing myself otherwise. I'd never had a job, nor had I made much of an effort to find one. I remember refusing to consider working in fast food because I felt I could do something better, even though I wasn't actually doing anything to pursue that.

Then, after spending about a week doing very little in my room, I felt a sudden urge to do something.

I opened my laptop and came across a job advertisement on Indeed. It had been posted eight minutes earlier. A company called Tech22 was looking for a warehouse helper to process electronics. Nothing particularly extraordinary, but I applied.

Within twenty minutes, I'd received a response inviting me to an interview.

The interview involved assembling a computer and getting it running. I got the job, and a few months later I was offered the opportunity to manage one of the company's stores. I was still seventeen.

The owner of Tech22 was a man named Thai Tran.

Thai would sometimes take me out for coffee at five in the morning. Our conversations usually began with practical things, often about business, but they had a tendency to become something more philosophical.

One idea in particular stayed with me: the importance of thinking deeper.

I remember him encouraging me to look at systems and the frameworks behind them. To understand why something worked the way it did, examine the assumptions it was built upon, and consider whether it could be broken down and reconstructed differently.

At seventeen, I understood what he meant, at least on the surface. But I don't think I appreciated the significance of what he was telling me.

It took years for that idea to develop into something I consciously tried to practise.

I'm not entirely sure why it stayed with me. I'm sure Thai said plenty of things worth remembering that I've since forgotten. But for whatever reason, those conversations continued to occupy a small part of my thinking.

Looking back, I think it's possible to inherit an idea long before you're ready to understand it.

Over time, my understanding of those conversations changed.

I've always been curious about people. When I was younger, much of my time was spent making friends, forming relationships, and moving between whatever circumstances I found myself in. The world never seemed particularly linear to me. Things changed constantly, and for the most part, I went along with them.

I often found myself listening more than speaking in group settings, trying to understand why people thought and behaved the way they did.

What interested me wasn't necessarily someone's actions, but the reasoning and circumstances behind them.

We often form assumptions about one another based on what we can observe. We see someone's behaviour, hear what they say, and construct an explanation for it. Yet so much of another person's experience remains invisible to us.

I began to recognise a distinction between observing an outcome and understanding the process that produced it.

That distinction eventually became central to how I approached learning.

I've always loved history, partly for the same reason.

Napoleon is a figure I've spent a considerable amount of time thinking about. Not simply because of his achievements, but because of how he thought, the circumstances that shaped him, and the people whose ideas influenced his own.

He studied figures such as Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, drawing upon the experiences of people who had lived centuries before him.

I often wonder how differently he might have thought had those figures never existed. How differently history might have unfolded, not only because of their direct actions, but because their ideas and examples continued influencing people long after their deaths.

To me, that's one of the most fascinating aspects of history.

We inherit far more than the physical consequences of what previous generations accomplished. We inherit their ways of thinking.

The frameworks underlying our technology, political institutions, cultures and understanding of the world didn't emerge independently of the people who came before us.

They developed through generations of experience, observation, disagreement, experimentation and failure.

Much of what we consider normal today rests upon ideas established by people we will never meet.

Yet inheriting an idea isn't necessarily the same as understanding it.

Someone could study Napoleon's writings, identify a particular strategy and attempt to reproduce it. They might even achieve some success. But without understanding the circumstances in which that strategy emerged, the problems it was intended to solve, or the assumptions behind it, what have they really learned?

They might have learned how to reproduce a strategy without understanding why it worked.

I think genuine learning requires curiosity about that distinction.

It means asking not only what someone believed, but why they believed it. What information was available to them? What constraints were they working within? What alternatives did they consider? And would their conclusions remain valid under different circumstances?

Understanding someone's reasoning also doesn't require agreeing with it.

I can admire Napoleon's ambition and strategic thinking while recognising the terrible consequences of many of his actions. His achievements don't place him beyond criticism, just as his failures don't make everything about his thinking worthless.

The same applies to the systems and ideas we inherit.

I don't believe we should preserve established frameworks simply because they were once successful. Nor do I believe that challenging them automatically produces something better.

We should first try to understand why they exist.

Sometimes that understanding will reveal limitations worth addressing. Other times, it might show us that an established approach has survived for good reason.

The point isn't to reject what came before us. It's to develop the capacity to examine it independently.

I've also had to learn that this principle applies to my own thinking.

For a period of my life, I became obsessed with optimisation. I tried building systems around almost every aspect of how I lived, convinced that organising everything properly would lead to a better life.

Eventually, I began to question that assumption.

So much of my life had been shaped by circumstances I couldn't have reasonably predicted. Even getting my first job had come from an impulsive decision following a week of doing very little.

There was something contradictory about attempting to perfectly systematise a life whose most meaningful developments had often emerged from unpredictability.

I've also struggled with rumination. There have been times when I've spent far more energy examining a situation than taking the actions necessary to change it.

Thinking deeply doesn't necessarily mean thinking endlessly.

And challenging a framework doesn't mean the framework is wrong.

These are distinctions I'm still learning to make.

More recently, I've found myself thinking about these ideas when using artificial intelligence.

We now have tools capable of producing writing, software and answers in seconds. I use them extensively, and I recognise how useful they can be. But I've also noticed how easy it is to accept an answer without fully understanding it.

Sometimes a system will produce a convincing explanation or a useful piece of work, and I'll find myself moving forward with the result before properly examining how it arrived there.

I don't think that makes the output worthless. Much of the value of these tools comes from their ability to do things we would otherwise spend considerable time doing ourselves.

But I wonder what happens when we become so accustomed to receiving conclusions that we stop questioning the reasoning behind them.

An answer can be correct without the person receiving it understanding why.

And when that answer is wrong, or only partly applicable to the situation, that missing understanding becomes much more important.

My concern isn't simply that machines will do more of our work. It's that we might gradually become less inclined to do our own thinking.

There is a distinction between using a tool to extend our understanding and allowing it to substitute for understanding altogether.

I don't pretend to know exactly where that distinction lies. I'm still figuring it out in my own work.

But I think it's worth being conscious of, particularly as these systems become more capable and more deeply integrated into how we learn, work and make decisions.

It's another reason I've come to appreciate those early conversations with Thai.

He wasn't simply encouraging me to find better answers. He was encouraging me to become more interested in the questions behind them.

I decided to begin writing because I've spent years developing these thoughts without properly preserving them.

I'm not particularly interested in convincing anyone that I've discovered the correct way to think. I expect that some of what I've written here will eventually seem incomplete, or perhaps even wrong, to an older version of myself.

In some ways, I hope that's the case.

I'd like to return to these words in five or ten years and understand how I saw the world at twenty-one, what influenced me, and how my thinking has developed since.

Sometimes I wonder how differently my life might have unfolded had I never applied for that job at Tech22.

I can't know whether I would have encountered similar ideas elsewhere, or eventually arrived at them independently.

But I do feel fortunate that, at that particular point in my life, I encountered someone who encouraged me to question what I thought I understood.

There are probably countless conversations from those years that I've forgotten. Ideas that might have influenced me had I paid closer attention, or lessons I wasn't yet ready to appreciate.

But one idea stayed.

And perhaps that's what interests me most about inheritance. We don't always recognise the significance of what we're receiving at the moment we receive it.

Sometimes it takes years before we begin to understand its value.

Years later, I'm still thinking about those early mornings, and I'm still trying to understand what it really means to think deeper.