Author Chat: Smart Thinking by Jo Owen

Many of us find ourselves facing difficult work situations, day after day – often as a result of existing patterns of behaviour – or at the mercy of negative and intrusive thoughts. But such cycles can be broken, allowing you to approach problems and challenges in a more robust and sustainable way.

In this edition of Author Chat, Disrupt Your Career speaks with Jo Owen, award-winning author and serial entrepreneur, about his book Smart Thinking: How to live, think and work even better (Bloomsbury Business, November 2024). In Smart Thinking, Jo focuses on common thinking challenges we all face from time to time, both rational (such as problem-solving) and emotional (mental health issues, for example), while also offering an array of practical and realistic solutions.

Why did you write the book and how did you write it? 

Smart Thinking came about by accident. It’s an accidental book that caused me total panic. My publisher asked me: “Have you got any other books beyond Smart Work and Smart Leadership?” which I wrote. In a fit of idleness, I said, “Well, we’ve got to do something different, how about Smart Thinking?” And he said, “Oh, great idea!”. So I go back home, sit in front of the computers, and go right: “Smart thinking, by Jo Owen”, smart thinking is … or blimey… what is it? What is smart thinking? So I go to the bookshop to get inspiration. I discovered there’s an entire section called Smart Thinking, full of Nobel Laureates. So I’ve just committed to writing the category-defining book on smart thinking, and I haven’t got a clue what it is. What I think we are going to do, and I try to do, is three things. First of all, define “what is smart thinking?”. Second, the book shows that actually everyone is a smart thinker, especially, of course if they buy the book! Everyone is already a smart thinker, but actually, everyone can think even better, because having gone through endless iterations of what is smart thinking – Is it being a smart Einstein? No, well, that’s a short book and useless. Is it about having plain IQ and lots of degrees? Well, lots of people with high IQ do really stupid things and don’t live great lives. Is it about knowing the 168 logical fallacies that Wikipedia un-usefully list out? Well, if you know all 168, yes you’re smart, but actually you’re also a smarty pants who will lose friends and alienate people, left, right and center. So we’re left with “what is smart thinking?” and actually what it is, is really simple. It’s about understanding how to navigate life successfully. That’s simple. If you understand how to navigate life successfully, you’re a smart thinker, and it doesn’t matter whether you’re Einstein or whether you’re working in reconciliations in the back office of a bank, or if you’re a Dogon tribesman in the middle of Mali. If you have worked out how to navigate your life successfully, you’re a smart thinker, because you’re having to make all sorts of choices and decisions every moment of the day to figure out “What do I do? How do I do it? How do I relate to this person? How do I solve this? How do I do this?” We’re always making these decisions, and most of the time we’re making good decisions, yet we are on autopilot. That is how smart we are. We don’t even have to think about things; we’re on autopilot and we just do it. To give you an example of how much we’re on autopilot: You’re in a car at the moment, when you next cross a bridge, are you going to demand to see all the engineering drawings, check the engineering drawings and check the maintenance? No, you just drive across the bridge, because you can assume the bridge is safe, and when you get in a lift, elevator, if you’re American, do you check all the maintenance records? You just assume. So we make endless assumptions, which actually are very useful, because if we didn’t make those assumptions, life would be impossible. So we’re navigating life really well without even thinking about it. Now occasionally we all have those moments where we go, “Oh, I wish I hadn’t done that”. Or we have little meltdowns where we get into a funk and we start sort of ruminating and seeing that the world’s a terrible place. Those are moments where actually we could land up thinking even better. So smart thinking is about how you navigate life better, how you make good decisions about how you feel, about how you relate to other people, about how you understand and interpret the world around you, whether it’s reading papers, reading reports, whether it’s understanding numbers, the whole time we’re having to think and react well. 

How can we become more aware of those moments when a quick pause would help us shift from autopilot to smarter, more intentional thinking?

Most of the time we do it well, sometimes we get really let down by our own thinking. What Smart Thinking does is: it helps people identify all those moments where you can think even better. For instance, whatever your mood is at the moment, you may think that is being dictated by your environment. Maybe you’re out on a terrace somewhere, sipping a glass of wine, you’re very happy. Maybe you’re outside getting cold and miserable. Maybe you just met someone who really cheers you up. Maybe you’ve met someone who depresses you. These are all things that happen, but actually, how you feel is your choice. And that’s a really difficult thing for people to understand, but once you understand that you can choose how you feel, and then you understand how to choose how you feel, then you see it’s liberating and empowering, because now you can choose your feelings as you want, more or less independently of circumstances. Isn’t that brilliant? Now I was born to be a pessimist. I was always taught that the only reason it’s not raining is because it’s about to rain, since I am of Welsh heritage, there’s a good reason for that actually being reasonably accurate as a statement. But if you live like that, that’s pretty depressing, and all the evidence shows that optimists live longer, get richer and do better than pessimists. There is lots of research on that, which is devastating for a pessimist, because that means I’m going to die young, alone and poor. So I have even more reasons to be pessimistic. But then you realize actually: Optimism, Pessimism, Choices… and you can learn to make those choices. So I’ve learned, I have the recovering pessimist guide to optimism, and that’s part of the book. You can choose to be optimistic. You can choose to be pessimistic. That’s just one little example. 

What’s the difference between smart thinking and weak thinking? 

Actually, it’s very simple: the difference between smart thinking and weak thinking is basically two seconds. That’s all it is. Because most of the time we’re on autopilot – and autopilot works, okay, great – but occasionally in these critical moments of truth, those really difficult, critical moments, autopilot can really let us down. Yet we suddenly lose it, we’re angry, frustrated, whatever it is, and a bad situation rapidly gets a lot worse, just because our auto pilot goes into fight or flight and it’s all a complete mess, basically. By those two seconds, you move from autopilot into conscious thinking, and most of the time, you’re a smart thinker already, you will make a good decision about how you actually want to react. So we can get terribly fancy and sophisticated about smart thinking. Actually, this is a really good news book: you’re already among the smart thinkers, and the difference between smart thinking and weak thinking is often two seconds. Are there a lot of tools and techniques? Yes, there are lots of real simple hacks that you can do, just to for instance choose how you feel or to read effectively, or to work numbers. I list those all out, but the message is simple: Smart Thinking, you’re already smart, you can think even smarter, think about two seconds. That’s it.

It sounds like the book for everybody…

I think it is the book for everyone, and it certainly was the book for me, because I started with this terror of the blank sheet of paper, and then went on this voyage of discovery. Thinking that smart thinking would be this high-faluting academic, technical stuff. It isn’t. It’s about life, and actually it’s so empowering and so encouraging. It’s a wonderful book. It’d be so tempting to say: “Oh, you need a remedial course in smart thinking”. No, you don’t. You’re already good. Build on what you’re good at, trust yourself, learn some of the hacks as well, and you’ll get even better. 

Can you share some ideas or exercises from your book that might help us to improve our thinking and become happier?

I’ll go back to the recovering pessimist’s guide to optimism. You are as you think, literally. We take Descartes “I think, therefore I am” so the Owen version of Descartes is that “You are as you think”. Thinking as optimism or pessimism, that’s one axis. So I started off as pessimist, but then did some really simple exercises. Exercise one, just note down three good things that happened today. At the end of the day, before you go to bed, pen and paper, three good things that happened. And soon enough, you start noticing all the good stuff in life. You could do the pessimist version, and you might have noted down all the bad things that happened today, and you just get really depressed, okay? And you notice all the bad stuff, but don’t notice the three good things. So for instance, now every day I get up in the morning and I wake up to two miracles. In two minutes. I go to this bathroom, turn on the tap and cold water comes running out, unlike when I’m in working with the tribes, where I have to walk a kilometer to a river to draw some water. Then I turn another tap on, hot water comes out, and I don’t have to start a fire to heat the water. Two miracles in two minutes. You can’t have a bad day after that. So we tend to take all these miracles of modern life for granted. But once you’re aware of them, it’s like, isn’t this brilliant? So that’s one simple exercise. It’s clinically proven. Do it for 30 days, and you will start seeing the world a different way. Another really simple exercise that I do with groups is this, I make an offer to the group: I have a time machine, and you’re welcome to come in this time machine with me, and you can bring your family and friends if you want. And here’s the deal: we will go back 250, years, and you’re going to be able to live the rest of your life as a prince or princess. Okay, what a deal. I mean, who doesn’t want to live life as a prince or princess? So who’s going to take me up on this offer? And regularly, 90% of people decline this incredibly generous offer. Why? Because they think about it and go, Well, hang on and they’re going to be living without central eating or air conditioning, living without electricity, without indoor sanitation, without anesthetics, and I just had an impacted wisdom tooth extracted, probably doing that without anesthetics, without internet, without social media, without … and they go, you know… So, think about this: 90% of people are saying, Actually, my life is better than the life of royalty used to be 250 years ago. Isn’t that great? So maybe, just maybe, life’s not so bad after all. So again, the book’s full of little examples like that, just to help people think a little bit differently and maybe a little bit clearer. So, you’re already good thinker, but there are so many little things we can do to just make it even better.

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