intellectual malleability

easily intrigued, easily transformed

Paris in July

I’ve recently been reflecting on how impressionable I am and why. As in: how quickly do I take to someone else’s way of seeing the world? How open am I to new ideas, and how quickly do I adopt those ideas myself?

To answer this, I started by examining my learning process. I love reading. And more than just reading, I love highlighting, annotating, commenting, and sending excerpts off to others (if you’re on the other end of my content sprints, you might have a mental image coming to mind of screenshots and links popping up sequentially in our message history). It’s like I’m making my own mental information map, designed to reflect what my mind is currently mulling over. As I was looking through some recent rabbit holes I’d gone down, I realized I was consistently highlighting 50%+ of the content in articles I was reading, while others were only highlighting a few sentences. I think I do this because almost everything seems valuable to me. I don’t want to miss a word, I want to understand and internalize it all.

I’ve always been like this—in school, I highlighted everything so aggressively that my notes might as well have been painted yellow. I think this tendency to over-highlight stems from a love of learning. From wanting to be impressed upon. The idea of absorbing new information or finding something that could change my world view in a chunk of text has always been wild to me. Riveting. The energy I get from the very thought of learning something new propels my eyes across the page. The more entranced I get, the narrower my focus gets. Eventually, my cursor is highlighting line after line, waiting to stumble upon the insight that will wake me out of my trance of consumption, make me lean back in my chair and think: wow—a new idea that I can put in my pocket and take with me throughout my life. And the highlighting is part of the discovery, part of the excavation.

I always felt like the learning was the interesting part (not just the take away, but actually getting there), like I was building towards something meaningful. 

I think there's something to be said here about the pros and cons of being intellectually malleable: easily intrigued, easily transformed. It's a double edged sword. It keeps you from focusing on tasks, sometimes. It keeps you from thinking for yourself, sometimes. But simultaneously, it keeps your attention glued to the person you’re listening to. It opens your mind to new information. It makes you question yourself, but equally, being malleable makes you look at the world inquisitively, like you’re constantly trying to find something.

Impressionability and malleability

With intellectual malleability, comes being impressionable. I always joke that although I may come across as inquisitive (which I am), I might be one of the most gullible people you’ll ever meet (my brothers figured this out before I did). I look for the good in people and am optimistic and trusting, in general. It’s not easy for me to detect deception. I have to discipline myself to be skeptical. But I think that gullibility is merely a symptom of being impressionable.

I don’t know whether it's good or bad to be impressionable. Like most things, it's got light and shadow to it (duality is everywhere!). Being a sponge can be helpful, and it can also lull you into a trance where you are slower to generate ideas of your own—all the fulfillment you need comes from consumption, from the learning itself. But there’s a balance to strike here between consumption and creation. Between consumption and synthesis. You can’t consume information endlessly (or, at least, I can’t)—it eventually becomes excessive and unnerving. That balance between absorbing knowledge and actually doing something with it is what I’ve been chasing for as long as I can remember.

Curiosity and malleability

I was always a playful child. Easily amazed, easily amused, curious, engaged, tenacious, and inquisitive. I was also highly observant. I would remember what people would say, wear, and do at a level that even when I was young I knew was greater than average. I was imaginative. I loved fiction, fantasy, stories, shows. I would get engrossed in the media I was consuming as a kid. I remember lying on a chair in my living room upside down reading Harry Potter for so long that I nearly fell over when I stood up.

I always loved living in what could be. In my imagination. In the world of others, in their minds. And I think that is perhaps why I was always so impressionable. I wanted to see what someone else was seeing, and understand it. I wanted to go places that reality wouldn’t let me into—fantasy worlds, starring characters that didn’t exist. I wanted to see what I could discover beyond the constraints of my own reality.

And I think to really do that—to fall into someone’s world and truly understand it—you need to be impressionable. You need to immerse yourself in something that breaks your worldview.

Logic and malleability

I balanced being malleable with studying logic. Or, at least, that’s the narrative I weave in hindsight. I was naturally imaginative, so I studied engineering and theoretical math to keep my brain sharp and rational, or something. The truth is probably closer to the fact that I was a decent math and science student at the time I picked my major, so I figured: why not? Eventually I realized the answer to that question is that we should not necessarily do something only because we have the capability to excel at it. We need desire in addition to capability to excel. But I suppose another symptom of being malleable is that anything can be made interesting to you, which allowed me to study something I wouldn’t have picked if my options were a limited selection of subjects that I could find interesting. I was (am) open to everything. This, again, has two edges to it. Differentiation, decisiveness, velocity are crucial to making progress. We can’t be persuaded or convinced by anything at any time, forever. Eventually we do need to harden ourselves. Reduce our malleability. This is how we define our direction, move forward, create something meaningful.

I recently shared one of the challenges of being intellectually malleable on Twitter: by always wanting to understand every angle of something—the argument and the opposition—I’m hardly ever able to have a thought without a counter-thought popping up immediately, making it difficult to build momentum. This led me to ask: is seeing everything both ways constructive or destructive?

One of the replies made an impression on me (clearly not a huge feat, but still):

Kiriya @saccakiriya0

@isabelhazan constructive to understanding, destructive to productivity.

I think this captures the key pro and con of intellectual malleability quite well. If your goal is better understanding—if you’re constantly trying to approach a better approximation of reality—then you simply must be intellectually malleable. You need to be willing to break your mental models and replace them constantly. But if you’re trying to move in one, uniform direction and simply be productive, it’s not necessarily beneficial to always be throwing your mental models at the wall and seeing what sticks. Sometimes you need to harden yourself intellectually, put your head down and get things done. It all depends on what you’re optimizing for: understanding or output. Fortunately for me, writing is my output, and it is made more interesting by the constant pursuit of better understanding. So, I seem to have met myself in the middle by finding an outlet to make intellectual malleability productive. And that outlet is this substack. Go figure.

While it has its drawbacks, being intellectually malleable—impressionable, curious, imaginative—is one of my favourite things about myself. I can see the world in full colour, even in shades so subtle they’re not detectable to the eye—they require imagination. And once you get used to seeing the world in such richness, it’s hard to go back to black and white. And maybe that’s why I like writing so much. It lets me continue to discover new colours, add those crayons to my pencil case, and pull them out to shade in any situation. I find the world of imagination and malleability quite fun to play in, rather than limiting myself to exclusively exist in the rigid constraints of pure rationality.

I think this is why fiction is so enjoyable as well: it lets us be somewhere in the middle, somewhere that doesn’t make complete sense, but makes just enough sense that we can still see ourselves in it, that we can still relate to it. And what a thrill it is to have a whole new version of reality impressed upon us (maybe this is why people in tech often gravitate towards fantasy/sci-fi… it is an escape from the binary, logical world they occupy outside of those pages).

Blending dreams and reality

I think being a dreamer is my natural state. But I have also always had a soft spot for logic: wanting to understand why things are the way they are, wanting a right or wrong answer, feeling compelled to have a series of supporting arguments to substantiate my views, so I’ve countered my malleable nature with logic training.

This duality can be hard to manage—imagination and logic are always wrestling with each other to dominate my thoughts. Both can put up a good fight, a compelling argument for why I should pay more attention to one over the other. I’m not sure who’s winning. It’s always changing. And maybe that’s why my world has always been such a unique blend of the two.

PS - If you enjoyed this and want to read more, you can find past posts here.