Oct, 2025
Maths teachers in school have this thing where they keep asking you to show your work (the exact steps you took). I almost always ended up in problems over this with them because I'd skip most steps only doing them in my head. But this part of showing your work had a lot of uses. One was for the teacher to actually see that you had thought through the solution. Another was that the teacher could actually understand the solution without having to solve it himself. And another was that if you went wrong, the teacher could see where you went wrong and provide specific feedback. This makes sense in hindsight but I never listened and half the time the teacher suspected I'd cheated because I'd skip entire pages of working. Once I argued about it and he went you can't do this in your head and asked me to do it while he stood over my shoulder, which I did and he didn't have a problem with it after that. Similar to showing your work in maths, there is this thing where you show your thinking (the steps in your thoughts you took to get to a specific thought). It can be a lot easier for the other person to understand exactly what you mean if you do this because it provides the right context for what you are saying. It can also help you get more depth on what you are saying by causing other people to share supporting or refuting points specific to what you are thinking. If you're on the receiving end of the person showing their thinking, you can learn a lot. It has similar uses as showing your work in maths. You can easily follow along without having to come to the same thought yourself. You can see how well or not the other person actually thought it through and if the conclusion is wrong you can see exactly which step in the thinking led to it being wrong. You can also show your thinking to yourself and get both the benefits of being the person on the giving and receiving end of it. You do this by writing. Trying to write down all the steps of a thought enable you to look at contradictions in your thinking which exist because your thoughts are a jumble of many other thoughts. This exercise also helps in deciding how much value to give to the thought being shared. If someone makes an unusual claim you can ask them to show their thinking steps. For example, if someone in your company got up one day and said that the users need a revamped UX for the app, you should neither support nor resist, but instead ask the exact process that ended up with that conclusion. More often than not, there will be no process. The worst part of this kind of a conclusion is that because you don't know which parts are exactly problematic and how, you have a bigger chance of making them worse because there are an infinite ways for doing something wrong but only a few ways for doing something right. The thinking process for this claim would look something like this. If you don't know what a car is and dont know how to start it, there are about a dozen buttons inside it that you can try pressing. If you don't even limit yourself to buttons you can try pushing the car or opening and closing its side mirrors. This sounds absurd because you know how a car works but if you did not you would have an infinite number of wrong things to try. You can say that you are learning from your mistakes but this type of a situation is not what is meant when people say you can learn from your mistakes. I share this because I've realized that this exercise of showing your thinking or asking someone to show their thinking is not common and maybe even odd for most people when I ask questions to get a look at someone's thinking steps. I personally have gotten too used to exercising it with a few people. For instance, Tamseel once had me try to trace a thought back to 3 months partially successfully. He has better systems for this than I do. I think more of us should do this exercise. Though a word of caution because not everyone actually thinks through their thoughts. Some people have their thinking tokens disabled and their thoughts are just borrowed and it does neither of you good to insist on asking them to show their thoughts.
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