Category: Systems thinking

Most of us went to school. And if not everyone, then at least we all asked ourselves this question at some point: why am I memorizing all these dates, formulas, and facts? Why do I need to know the chronology of events – revolutions and conquests that happened hundreds, even thousands of years ago, in countries where I don’t even live? Why do I need to understand how chemical compounds work or molecular interactions if I’m not planning to become a scientist and conduct research?

These questions haunted not only me, but everyone who ever stopped to ask themselves: why am I doing this? What’s the point? Those moments of awareness when you question the purpose of your actions – those are some of the best questions you can ask yourself, your surroundings, or even into the void. Trying to find answers is how we gain new knowledge, how we open the door for it. When a question arises, you inevitably start searching for an answer. If you don’t find it immediately, it spins around in your subconscious until you find the answer either deliberately or by accident.

Conform Or Face Unpredictability

The classical education system was built a long time ago, decades in the past, and the school-university curriculum can’t keep up with the speed at which society and the surrounding landscape change. The frequency and volume of changes are so great that retraining teachers in schools or universities simply isn’t feasible. To teach, you first need to study to become a teacher, get an education, and only then start working.

Good teachers are those who have experience, teaching talent, understanding of psychology, the ability to communicate with people – a set of skills that not everyone possesses. But we all go through school. Some drop out, some, like me, try to survive in this system, conform to the rules, get good grades, defend dissertations, all to guarantee a calm future.

When that future arrives, when you enter the job market, it turns out that knowledge isn’t as necessary as you thought. This wasn’t entirely unexpected – we asked these questions before – but the paradox is that no one gives you answers, yet you still have to perform these actions despite the absence of reasons. No one knows anything better, there’s one scenario that everyone follows, and you have to follow it too.

Especially when you don’t have weight and power in your words, you can’t resist the will of parents or your environment, which influences you so much that it’s scary to do anything outside the framework. You follow established norms.

The Real Purpose of Education (That Nobody Tells You)

Here’s what I’ve come to understand: education isn’t aimed so much at gaining knowledge as it is at training your brain. Exercises where you have to engage your cognitive abilities, think, remember – these shape your brain, your ways of thinking, your patterns. For example, solving geometric problems is built on algorithms. If you solve dozens of such problems, then when solving life problems, you might see a pattern and apply the algorithm. But we’re taught to solve problems, not the algorithms for solving them. You have to figure that out yourself. It’s not obvious, it’s not lying on the surface, and you understand it years later.

Reading books expands your horizons, especially literature, and allows you to draw on centuries-old wisdom that great writers share through their immortal works.

Mathematical or chemical problems develop logical thinking, allowing you to use skills to solve problems, which is training for the brain. In adulthood, you need to apply this same brain. If it’s been trained since childhood, when it’s plastic and forming, things will be easier for you.

But for some reason, more than a decade has passed since I finished school, and I still have to justify it in your eyes and come up with ways that school helped me. At school, nobody knows about this, nobody talks about it, nobody explains it to students. They just present you with a fact: memorize these dates by tomorrow. For what purpose, why – even the teacher doesn’t know. Why these dates? Because they’re in the textbook approved by the Ministry of Education, which hasn’t changed in years.

Did School Really Teach You Something?

“Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.”

— John Dewey (20th century, American educational reformer)

Think back to your first real job after university or school, whichever came first for you. What skills or knowledge from school did you actually have to apply, what exercises done in school helped you solve problems that move the business or structure where you work forward, what abilities acquired in school helped you deal with deadlines, pressure from colleagues, client expectations, bill payments? I’m confident the number approaches zero.

And here’s what the data shows: I’m not alone in this observation. According to a 2023 survey of 1,600 participants, 77% of recent college graduates said they learned more in six months on the job than in four years of college. Even more striking, 68% felt their degree did not provide the skills needed for their job. On the employer side, 75% of HR leaders believed colleges “aren’t preparing people at all” for workplace needs.

The numbers don’t lie. There’s a massive gap between what schools teach and what real work demands.

Living in a World the Education System Can’t Catch Up To

Why did all this happen and why does it continue like this? Why do we live in a different world, one that changes every day, where there’s artificial intelligence that, together with robots, is actively replacing people, and soon not only physical but also mental professions will be performed not by humans? In a world where there’s the internet, where knowledge and information are freely available to anyone who can connect? Where there are more smartphones than people, and access to data has never been easier?

In a world where information isn’t the new gold, but is so excessive that a new problem has emerged: information overload. Psychological disorders arise because the brain can’t cope with the flow, volume, and variety of data.

These are theoretical questions, reflections, but I’ll lead you to this: on the internet, in data sources, there’s a lot that you can use to your advantage, to gain the skills you need independently. The system doesn’t choose for you what to study – you choose what skill holds you back, what you need to acquire to move forward.

For everyone, this is their own set of knowledge. Freedom of choice gives almost unlimited opportunities to live and develop in the modern world, if you have access to the internet.

When Real Learning Actually Begins

“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”

— Confucius (c. 5th century BC, Chinese philosopher)

I can’t help but recall an example from my own life. I was invited to work when I was in my second year of university. Due to peculiarities in my thinking and the fact that I enjoyed computers, which I got early in life, I was interested in programming. In programming classes, I did well, which my teacher noticed. She invited me to work at the university’s information center, which she managed, as a programmer. Without thinking long, I agreed.

In my student years, the alternative was working in the service industry, where they paid more, but programming work appealed to me more because it gave prospects and experience by the time I graduated from university – a critical factor for finding work. I agreed and came to work my first day as a programmer.

The first task they gave me was very different from what I’d done before. At university, they explained how to solve a problem, gave methods and templates, and by applying them I got the expected answer. Here it was different. My boss gave me a task: write a system.

We were writing an information system for the university to maintain a database of students and applicants – a custom ERP system where all information about students was stored. There were user screens for managing information that was filled in when entering the university.

A One Task And a Pile of Books

My task: create a query system for the database that would be convenient for a simple user, so they could compose a query and get results in the form of a dynamic table, generated from the database of students and applicants.

I’m staring at the computer screen, having written down the task formulation in my notebook, not understanding what to do or how to solve it. I didn’t know what a query system was or what an ERP system was. We only started studying these two courses later.

I wasn’t working alone – I had a colleague who had been writing this system for a long time. The logical question to him: where do I start? He understood that I had no experience and handed me a set of books: about PHP, a textbook on SQL, and a textbook on JavaScript. Three huge thick books, more voluminous than many literary works we read in school.

Listening to my colleague, I started reading, quickly realizing that I wouldn’t finish the task today. I clarified the deadline. The manager understood that the task was new for me, but without a deadline, it would never get done. She set a deadline – one and a half months. Considering working time, this should be enough.

I have a deadline, three huge textbooks, and zero understanding of what to do.

To be continued.

The Moment Everything Changed

So there I am, sitting in front of the computer, surrounded by textbooks, looking at the task I need to complete, not understanding which side to approach it from. I start reading textbooks, doing some basics. But I run into the first problem: I need to install a software environment to access the database. I need to have access to the server to upload executable files. We wrote in PHP, JavaScript helped with queries.

Remember, this was a time when the internet wasn’t developed enough to find an answer to every question. There was no Stack Overflow where you could copy-paste code. Everything had to be written almost from scratch, which is what we did. I had a more experienced colleague, and I wasn’t shy about asking him questions. He showed me what programs he uses, what to install. I followed his advice, copied his experience.

He showed me the foundation for my product. In the admin panel with database access, there’s a query system, convenient and flexible, allowing any query. My task – make the same thing for our database, an analog of this system. I started doing it. I have a sample, tools, a colleague I can ask, books from which to draw information.

Then everything moves forward in iterations. I need to understand where the code begins. First, make a page with a connection to the database. I go to the book, see how it’s done, from the very beginning – that’s how any program in PHP starts, I figure out what a connection is, how the database works, I read the SQL book, connect, study the structure, and so on step by step.

The Final Release

By the appointed deadline, in one and a half months, from under my hands comes a finished product – a query system that we publish for users. The boss is satisfied, users not so much, because it’s complicated for them. I had to train them: I came to users, showed them how to use it, wrote instructions, posted them.

This is where the real learning happened. Not in the classroom where we discussed theory. Not in the textbooks I skimmed. But in the doing. In the building. In the struggling and figuring it out as I went.

And this aligns with what research has consistently shown: active learning – where students engage in practical problem-solving and hands-on activities – significantly outperforms passive lecturing. A landmark meta-analysis of 225 studies found that active learning improves exam performance by approximately 6% on average and reduces failure rates by over 10%. Students in project-based learning classes have been shown to score 8 percentage points higher on science assessments than their peers in traditional classrooms.

The data confirms what I experienced firsthand: you don’t learn by listening. You learn by doing.

From Zero to Hired: The Power of Real Projects

Everything continued similarly after that. They’d give me a task, I’d complete it. Over 4 years of work at the university, by the time I graduated, I had decent experience in programming and developing information systems, real ones from day one. I learned to program in PHP, JavaScript, describe systems that real users actually used, get feedback, refine them, develop my skills.

Later, I had no problems with hiring, since I wanted work in IT. As soon as my resume appeared online, calls started coming, invitations from companies. All I had to do was choose what I liked. This was in 2011 – now the market is different, but nevertheless.

What’s the point of this story? To learn a skill, for example programming, you need several things. The key thing is not to take a course or learn something formally. We had a programming course – they taught theory, how code works, algorithms, methods for solving problems. But when faced with a real task, I realized that not one methodology was needed or useful, and I didn’t know what to do specifically.

This is the fundamental problem with traditional education. It prepares you for tests and exams, not for actual work. It gives you theory without context, knowledge without application, information without meaning.

And the consequences are staggering. Only 24% of recent college graduates felt they had all the skills needed for their current job. Nearly 96% of HR leaders said colleges should do more to prepare students for the workforce. The system is broken, and everyone knows it – except the system itself refuses to change.

The Freedom to Choose Your Own Path

But here’s the thing: you don’t need to wait for the system to fix itself and permission to start learning in a way that actually works. The internet has democratized knowledge in a way that was impossible even twenty years ago. The tools, the resources, the information – it’s all there, waiting for you to use it.

In the modern world, for anyone with internet access, you have unprecedented freedom. Freedom to choose what skills to develop, freedom to learn at your own pace, freedom to build real things that matter, not just complete assignments for grades.

You’re not trapped in a classroom anymore. You’re not dependent on outdated curricula or teachers who may not even work in the fields they’re teaching. You can find people who are doing the actual work, creating actual value, and learn from them directly.

The content creators, the practitioners, the builders – they’re all out there sharing their knowledge. Many of them share the bulk of their expertise for free, then compile it into courses for those who want the convenience of organized information. But the knowledge itself is accessible, it’s yours for the taking.

This is a profound shift in human history. For the first time ever, the barriers to learning have almost completely disappeared. The only barrier that remains is the one in your mind – the belief that you need formal education, that you need someone’s permission, that you need to go through the traditional system.

You don’t.

What This Means for You

So let me ask you this: think back to your own education. Your time in school, in university if you went. What percentage of what you learned there do you actually use in your daily work? In your real life? In the problems you solve and the value you create?

If you’re like most people, the answer makes you uncomfortable. Because deep down, you know the truth. You know that the most valuable skills you have – the ones that actually matter – you didn’t learn in a classroom. You learned them by doing. By building. By trying and failing and trying again.

The question isn’t whether traditional education has failed us. The data makes that abundantly clear. The question is: what are you going to do about it?

Because here’s the reality: you can spend years in classrooms, accumulating theoretical knowledge that may or may not ever prove useful. Or you can start today, right now, with a real project that teaches you exactly what you need to know, exactly when you need to know it.

Sometimes it may be wise not to spend your own time on things that can be delegated or automated. That’s exactly what I was thinking about while creating my content creation system, which, with the help of AI tools, allows me to have more than 72+ content pieces per week without spending full-time on it. If you are building your personal or corporate brand, it may save you a ton of time and money. Check it out: ANTIghostwriter.

Step-By-Step System Ahead

“You can’t learn riding a bicycle by attending a lecture. The good way to learn is to use it now.”

— Seymour Papert (20th century, MIT professor and AI pioneer)

In the next article, I’m going to share with you exactly how I did this. The specific steps I took to go from confused university student staring at three textbooks to confident programmer with companies calling me. The framework that worked for me, that’s worked for thousands of others, and that can work for you.

It’s not complicated. It’s not mysterious. But it is different from everything you’ve been taught about how learning is supposed to work.

And that’s exactly why it works.

The traditional education system had its time and place. But that time has passed. The world has moved on. Information is no longer scarce – your attention is. Your time is. Your life is.

Stop wasting it on learning methods designed for a world that no longer exists.

There’s a better way. And I’m going to show you exactly what it is.

Free your mind, free your brain. I bet almost everyone knows that feeling when you start cleaning up and organizing your space – your apartment, your room, or just your desk. After you’re done, there’s this incredible sensation of calm and satisfaction that you haven’t been able to achieve for a long time. It feels like you’ve created order not just around you, but inside your head too. Despite the physical effort and tiredness, your mind feels refreshed – like a clean slate, as if you’re starting everything from scratch.

This doesn’t happen by accident. It’s one of the most powerful ways to relax your mind and open it up for new achievements. Sometimes in life, we find ourselves feeling backed into a corner. So many things pile up, so much happens at once, and there’s literally no space in your head to think about things like your side project, your business, or how to improve your life. You barely have enough energy to collapse on the couch, watch some Netflix, and pass out.

Back in college, we had more energy, more physical strength and possibilities. You could go out with friends, drink something, stay up all night partying, end up at some club, and then somehow show up in the morning and ace an exam. That trick doesn’t work anymore, even though nothing seems to have changed. But something has changed. That mental space is now occupied by an enormous number of different things – physical objects, moral choices, and the responsibilities that appear after you enter adult life.

For example, you need to pay bills, pay for housing, pay off loans. I’m specifically using money examples because they actually take up a huge amount of time and mental space. We worry about money because it’s a necessary resource for survival – there’s a direct correlation. You constantly think about how to earn more, where to find money to pay off a loan, how to make sure everything’s covered next month while still saving for a vacation. How to find money to fix the washing machine that hasn’t worked for weeks… all these separate little pieces that occupy mental bandwidth.

A 2020 study in the Journal of Environmental Psychology found that people in cluttered homes had significantly elevated cortisol levels throughout the day – concrete evidence that disorder literally stresses us out on a biochemical level. This isn’t just about being neat – it’s about how your environment directly impacts your brain’s ability to function.

Your Environment Is Programming Your Brain (Whether You Know It Or Not)

Let’s talk about how our consciousness and subconscious actually work. The brain is a relatively powerful processor. If you don’t know what a processor in a computer does, it essentially processes information. It has certain input data that gets transformed somehow.

For instance, if you need to perform a calculation, two numbers and an operator between them are input – like two multiplied by two. The processor performs calculations and converts this information into output data, the result. In this case, it’s four. Right? So there’s input information, some transformation process, and output information.

This is obviously a simplified mechanism, because software is also involved in these processes, which transforms all this data differently but still uses processor power to deal with everything. The point is to draw an analogy with our brain, which processes information coming from our body in exactly the same way – from various receptors. These are tactile, visual, auditory, olfactory, visceral receptors, and there should be some others too – the exact details aren’t important.

All this data is processed by the brain, and the output is a signal telling the body what to do. For example, if a person sees some danger, the brain signals an adrenaline rush into the blood and alerts you that something’s wrong. You start feeling your body. Fear arises with the physical surge, and then you get a reflex to either run or assume a defensive position, and so on.

All these things seem instinctive to us, but actually the decision is made before we even realize it all at the subconscious level, and all commands are issued to our body without our participation. We may have the illusion that we control our body, but it’s not really conscious. We don’t control it; our subconscious does it for us, regulating things like blood flow, because you don’t think about making your heart beat at a certain rhythm, right? The brain regulates all this. And it all happens in the background, without our participation. This is a very important point for understanding how our body works and how we can deal with it.

Your Brain Is The Information Accumulator

“Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.” — David Allen, productivity expert

So we understand that the brain processes information. But what is this information? It’s actually everything that comes to us from around us, and everything we perceive throughout life. This is an important point because the brain is designed to store information. Apparently, this is necessary again for its survival, for development, so that it’s possible to remember, from a natural point of view, certain moments that either represent danger or, conversely, are useful for moving through life.

In a landmark study published in Science, researchers found that the mental load of concerns – even small ones – can significantly impair cognitive performance. In one experiment, participants showed a drop in cognitive test scores equivalent to a 13-point reduction in IQ when preoccupied with worries. This is what’s happening in your head every day with each unresolved task or cluttered space.

For example, we remember that this food is good, leads to development, to the growth of the organism. And this creature is dangerous, it should be avoided. Accordingly, all this is remembered and stored in the brain even without our conscious participation. If you don’t think about it, it doesn’t mean it’s not there. So there’s a huge amount of information stored there that you don’t even suspect exists.

We don’t know this for sure yet, because we haven’t yet invented a way to read information from the brain, i.e., what’s stored there. Well, we can read some of it. These are, as a rule, such reflex things, for example, which are the responsibility of certain parts of the brain. We’ve learned to catch the electrical signals it generates and can interpret them, for example, mouse movement, or typing certain words on a virtual keyboard.

This is working now, it’s no longer theory, these are real working mechanisms that allow, for example, paralyzed people to interact with a computer and even communicate with people, which was previously completely impossible. But there’s a theory that seems very applicable in life: that the brain or subconscious stores absolutely all information and remembers everything that comes into it over time.

That’s exactly why when you go to a psychologist, for example, in your 30s, you suddenly discover with them that a huge number of decisions you’ve made in life were made because of a childhood trauma that happened to you, occurred at age 3. It seems like it was decades ago, why do all this, but the fact is that each event forms, especially during brain development, certain neural connections.

And this, by the way, is already a proven fact. And the way it works is this: Neural connections are responsible precisely for this logical understanding of things. When you make a conclusion about something, for example, based on other information. And that’s exactly why, by the way, artificial intelligence works based on neural networks. We’re trying to model the work of the brain that way.

And as we can see today from the result, it gives very good results, and it really does seem that our brain works about the same way. Because you can just chat with ChatGPT and understand that there are some moments you won’t be able to distinguish from a living person.

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” — Leonardo da Vinci

So what’s all this about? It turns out that as we go through life, we accumulate all this information. And certain information, usually what’s relevant to us now, that is, for our survival, as the brain thinks, the information that needs to be processed now, we’re already working with it in consciousness. That is, there’s this prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for conscious thinking, that is, the feeling that you’re now thinking about yourself as a person at the present moment, and you’re feeling yourself. This is the so-called consciousness.

That is, what’s on your mind right now, and what’s embedded deep in the subconscious, that is, it’s already in the back of the cerebral cortex, it’s not directly accessible, but the subconscious gives it out in a certain case. Again, that is, when you see fire, for example, the subconscious can give you information that this thing is dangerous and hot, and you need to avoid contact with the flame. If there’s no flame in direct view, direct line of sight, then there’s no point in giving you this information either.

Clutter For Your Room – Clutter For Your Mind

“When our space is a mess, so are we.” — Dr. Libby Sander, organizational behavior expert

A neuroscience study published in the Journal of Neuroscience found that when your visual field is cluttered, your brain has to work significantly harder. Using fMRI scans, researchers discovered that visual clutter forces the brain to allocate additional resources just to filter out distractions – reducing your ability to focus on what matters. This is exactly what happens when your workspace is messy or your digital files are disorganized.

So, when we go through life, we accumulate a huge amount of this material, and whether to work with it or not, unfortunately, doesn’t depend on us, as we already know, this is controlled by the subconscious without our control, it can give out information, it can hide it from us. How this mechanism works is not really important, the main thing is that we don’t control it.

Often we simply don’t control the information that comes to us in consciousness from the depths of the subconscious. And here are all the most important moments when, for example, we have an emotional breakdown, or we react emotionally to something, that is, we don’t do it consciously, we don’t sit and think “now I need to experience this or that emotion”, no, it happens automatically, that is, there’s regulation of certain hormones in the body, and then we already consciously draw conclusions about what caused, for example, this emotional outburst, this event, we make logical connections, and so on.

So, when all this happens, and we start working with this information, we make a certain decision about what to do now, precisely at the level of our body or at the level, again, of consciousness, that is, we can think about it, decide something, for example, with this task, or, conversely, not decide.

And we finally come to the most important thing, to order in the head. The fact is that all these things that are around you, in the space that surrounds you, they’re not just physically around, they’re in your subconscious, even if you don’t think about them, because they’re perceived by your senses.

That is, you see them one way or another, even with peripheral vision, for example, you see that this box, which remained after unpacking the gadget, lying on the table, and it seems like you don’t pay attention to it, but it’s in your field of vision, and the brain reads this, it lies in the subconscious, and there’s this certain information, mental space, occupied precisely by this box.

Yes, it doesn’t pose any danger, but this is information, once again, that will live there until you need to make some kind of decision. For example, if the box suddenly comes alive one moment, turns into a monster, then you’ll need to react to it somehow, it means a danger signal will come, so you need to be on the alert and you need to monitor it, everything that’s here and now, you must definitely subject to this kind of analysis, and that’s exactly what your brain does.

That’s it for now, I think it’s a good starting point for the topic. And in the next article I will cover proven technics to reclaim your mental bandwidth. So, stay tuned and keep your mind as clear as possible.

We all have those moments when it feels like everything is going wrong, or even that everything is going sideways. It’s like you’re stuck in a perpetual cycle of challenges that never seem to end, and you have no idea what to do about them. It feels like this will be your reality forever, but that’s not actually the case.

What’s actually happening in these moments? On one hand, you’re experiencing stress. On the other, you’re facing a lack of clear understanding, vision, or sense of what lies ahead or even what’s happening now. This combination creates a mental fog that makes everything seem more difficult than it actually is.

Previously, I wrote the article ‘How to Kill Stress Before It Kills Your Dreams,’ which will be a great pair with this one.

The human brain is fascinating in its contradictions. It craves variety and has an inherent need for novelty, but simultaneously, it desperately desires predictability. Why? Because for your brain, predictability equals safety. When your brain understands that tomorrow will bring a new day, just as it does in nature where everything follows cycles, it knows there will be sunrise, daylight, and food. If suddenly the sunrise doesn’t come, or if daytime suddenly turns to night (like during a solar eclipse), or if your usual food source disappears from its normal place – these represent direct threats to your existence.

In response, your brain switches to survival mode. This is why in our modern world, this feeling becomes strange and unpleasant. We live in a world of abundance, where everything necessary is available and even more, yet events that don’t follow expected cycles create increasing stress for each of us.

The good news? There are effective ways to bring order to your life, clear the mental fog, and regain the ability to make optimal decisions. It’s not about having some magical personality trait – it’s about building a system that works with your brain rather than against it.

Why Your Mental System Is Breaking Down

The key element we need to address is clarity. Why do we experience this feeling of disorder or confusion? Because there’s no clarity. So we need to build it.

Know how you think

But before we go further, there’s a preventive step that, in my view, absolutely everyone should take. And the earlier, the better. You need to understand your thinking type and psychological profile.

There are various ways to do this. You could ask any AI model how to do it, or perhaps the AI could even help you based on the information you provide. But the key point is that you need to understand how your thinking model works and how you reactively respond to different situations.

For example, some people think rationally – like me. For me to convince my conscious and subconscious mind of the validity of a decision or to explain something to it, I need rational arguments. I need to present a series of arguments that follow systematic logic, and if everything fits together, if all the dots connect, if everything is absolutely sequentially connected, then that’s enough for my brain to calm down and accept the decision as correct, even if somehow it might be wrong. It’s a trick I play on my brain because I understand how it works, and I can manipulate it.

It’s completely different if you think emotionally. For your brain to make decisions, it needs an emotion, some strong surge of feelings that will make your brain look in one direction or another. In this case, it needs to be told a story, or presented with an event or situation that will speak to one outcome or another of your decision. And in this case, it’s much more effective to engage in precisely this – to visualize the outcome of one choice or another and base your conclusions on that.

But you need to understand which state your brain predominantly operates in – which model it more often thinks in. Because, understandably, at certain moments every person can switch from rational to emotional, but overall, one element usually prevails.

I understand that if I’m currently in an emotional state where emotions predominate, I need to fight with my mind. Typically, rational thinking always surfaces for me, and I tell myself that okay, I’m just emotional right now, I need to wait a bit until they subside, and make a decision after that. This is, again, purely rational behavior. It’s neither good nor bad – there’s no need to put labels on it. You just need to understand how it works and use it to your advantage.

Towards mental clarity

Here’s what most people miss: the quality of your decisions directly depends on your mental clarity. A striking study of Israeli parole judges found they were approximately twice as likely to grant a favorable ruling at the beginning of the day than just before a break. As their mental energy drained, the quality of their decisions deteriorated. This highlights why simplifying and systematizing your life is so crucial – it preserves your cognitive resources for when you really need them.

The state of mental clutter is particularly damaging because it hijacks your focus. Your consciousness becomes preoccupied with removing uncertainty or gaining clarity. That’s all your brain can focus on during these stressful moments. This essentially changes the focus and priority of your consciousness to dealing with this task. Your subconscious, which normally helps significantly, feels this burden too. And consequently, focusing on your current task, which you understand needs to be done, becomes more difficult – you have to force it out of yourself.

Most successful people aren’t just “naturally organized” – they’ve developed systems that work for their specific thinking style. Take the famous examples of Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Barack Obama, who all adopted routine wardrobes to eliminate trivial decisions. By systematizing low-priority choices, they preserved mental clarity for what truly mattered. As Zuckerberg explained, he wears the same style gray shirt each day to “make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community.”

The Complete Mental System

Once you understand your thinking model, you can build the appropriate framework for decision-making and your further actions. Since our goal is to bring clarity to a certain period of time ahead, we need to build it systematically.

Here’s the step-by-step system that will transform your mental clarity:

Step 1: Identify Your Dominant Thinking Style

As I mentioned earlier, some people think rationally while others think emotionally. Identifying which category you predominantly fall into is crucial because it determines how you should approach organizing your mind.

For rational thinkers, logical arguments and systematic approaches work best. You need to create structured lists, prioritization frameworks, and clear action steps. When making decisions, you’ll want to analyze pros and cons methodically.

For emotional thinkers, visualization and storytelling are more effective. Create vision boards that represent your goals, use journaling to explore how different outcomes would feel, and make decisions based on emotional resonance after visualizing potential scenarios.

You can determine your style by reflecting on past decisions. Did you make them primarily through logical analysis or emotional resonance? Neither is better or worse – they’re simply different ways your brain processes information. The key is to work with your natural tendencies rather than against them.

By the way, notice how I describe all these moments from a rational point of view. I present information in such a way as to explain and argue each postulate of my article. I’m again thinking from a rational point of view. If you lack the emotional delivery here, it just speaks to the fact that we have different ways of thinking.

Step 2: Create Environmental Order

This is about physically organizing your surroundings. If you’re currently in a room or building, look around. If you’re in nature, you probably don’t have this feeling because in nature, everything is already in order. You observe and don’t feel that something is wrong or needs to be fixed. The way trees grow, the way plants grow, the way mountains look, how the sea behaves – everything seems natural and authentic. Because it is.

If you leave nature as it is, it will flourish and prosper. And this is perceived absolutely naturally by humans because we are part of nature. We understand our unity with it, and nothing here causes any dissonance.

Approximately the same thing should happen in the environment we create for ourselves. This is an artificial environment created by humans, for humans. That is, it’s the space where you are. Your house or your apartment, your room, your office, your bedroom. In general, all of this.

If there’s disorder here, you know how you’ll feel. There are people, I know, who don’t understand this at all. For them, this feeling of being lost is absolutely normal. That is, something is always wrong, something is always not quite right, it’s not entirely clear what’s happening at all. And one can guess that in their room, most likely, there’s disorder.

Tidy it up, overcome yourself, and sort through all the items, throw away what you haven’t used for a long time. For example, I can’t understand this story when people buy a huge number of things just to not use them. Just things, things, things. It’s a consumer approach. Absolutely incomprehensible. I, on the contrary, strive to get rid of things, to make them as few as possible.

According to UCLA researchers, their 2009 study found that people who described their homes as “cluttered” had chronically high cortisol levels throughout the day compared to those who felt their homes were “restful” or orderly. These elevated stress hormones are associated with chronic fatigue and even physical health issues, providing biochemical evidence that disorder can literally “get under your skin.”

I adhere more to a minimalist lifestyle and don’t quite understand why you need to buy something new unless it’s an absolutely necessary item or something I use every day for one task or another that somehow helps me in life. If that’s not the case, it’s not entirely clear why to buy it.

Get rid of these things, sell them at a flea market, give them to someone who needs them, donate to charity. For example, clothes that you no longer wear can be donated to charitable causes. Of course, in your wardrobe, you’ll find more than one such item that you haven’t worn for a year, or maybe even several years.

According to a controlled neuroscience study from Princeton University, people in organized settings outperformed those in messy environments on tasks requiring concentration. The researchers found that visual clutter overloads the brain, forcing it to filter out irrelevant objects and thereby reducing focus and performance. When surrounded by clutter, your brain has to work overtime just to filter out distractions, leaving fewer resources for the task at hand.

Step 3: Brain Dumping

Another method is bringing clarity through writing, or through some other mechanism that allows you to lay out all your thoughts. This is very similar to tidying up, but not in physical space, but in the mental one.

How does this work? When you transfer your thoughts to paper – this is the most well-known method because it involves many sensory tools from your body. There’s vision and the visual part, there’s the tactile sensation of paper and pen, there’s also sound perception when you hear how the pen writes on paper or the rustle of the sheet. There’s also muscular interaction, that is, you have fine motor skills involved, and you feel this in your body. All possible sensory aspects of the body are involved here, which is why it’s the most effective way to do this.

So, you simply lay out your thoughts, you give a simple flow of what’s happening in your head, and it doesn’t matter how well it forms into understandable logical structures, sentences, or even makes sense. These can just be some scattered thoughts, but that’s not essential. The principle here is exactly the same as when cleaning. That is, these thoughts no longer occupy space in your head; they now lie here on paper.

A 2018 Baylor University study provided scientific evidence for this practice. Researchers found that people who took five minutes at bedtime to write down their to-do list for the next day fell asleep significantly faster than those who journaled about completed tasks (so both are valid). Writing down the list effectively offloaded their unfinished tasks from mind to paper, reducing bedtime worry and stress.

Step 4: Short-term vs. Long-term Clarity

While our aim is to introduce clarity to a certain time period ahead, it’s important to connect your short-term actions with your long-term vision. This doesn’t necessarily mean setting those clichéd goals for the year ahead – the brain finds it quite difficult to think in such large scales.

It’s much easier for it to think short-term – about tomorrow, for instance. You can visualize what will happen tomorrow, paint that picture for yourself. In most cases, this will be enough to understand that a new day will come. By doing this simple mental exercise, you’re essentially performing a mental trick to convince yourself that everything is under control.

Psychological studies on goal pursuit show significantly higher success rates with planning. Research on “implementation intentions” – specific action plans for goals – demonstrates that having concrete plans increases goal achievement by 60-70% compared to having no specific plans. While planning doesn’t guarantee success (plans can be derailed by unforeseen changes), it dramatically improves the odds.

Management consultant Peter Drucker warned that

“there is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

In other words, being busy and organized with the wrong tasks is wasted effort – you must prioritize what truly matters. The implication is that clarity comes from knowing which short-term actions serve long-term values.

US President Dwight Eisenhower famously said:

“What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.”

He developed the Eisenhower Matrix (urgent vs. important grid) as a systematic way to triage tasks. By planning and scheduling important-but-not-urgent activities, you prevent them from being drowned out by endless “urgent” minutiae.

Step 5: Systems Thinking Application

The final step is systematizing your vision. As a rational person, this is the most obvious tool that I want to apply first. This means creating a system – a system of vision, a system of the future, a system of what I will do. And for this, I lay out various tools that I possess, that I know how to use, that can help with this.

Therefore, study models of thinking and system analysis, ways of modeling systems, select the one that suits you in this specific situation, because different ways of thinking and modeling will act and help absolutely differently in different situations.

If you want to dig deeper into my tools for developing systems thinking, check out my previous articles:

• ‘The Power of Systems Thinking: How to See the Whole When Others See Parts’,
• ‘The Mental Model That Will Transform Your Life: How To See What Others Miss’,
• ‘Design Your Life Machine: Systems Thinking for Location-Independent Success’,
• ‘The Black Box Method: How Systems Thinking Can Free Your Brain (And Your Time)’

It’s much better to have a set of these tools in your arsenal to choose the most appropriate one for each situation.

Dr. Atul Gawande demonstrated the remarkable power of systems thinking when he led the implementation of a 19-item Surgical Safety Checklist by the World Health Organization in hospitals worldwide. After adopting this simple, systemic tool, major complications in surgeries fell from 11% to 7%, and inpatient deaths fell by over 40%. This case shows systems thinking in action: the checklist provided clarity (everyone knows the critical steps and their timing) and reduced stress under pressure.

By viewing your mind and environment as interconnected systems with feedback loops, you can identify leverage points: a small change (like adopting a checklist or clearing a desk) cascades into larger benefits via positive feedback – clarity, calm, and efficiency breeding more of the same.

Psychologists have noted that when your environment is full of visual distractions, each irrelevant object or piece of information acts as a “distractor” that your brain must process or suppress. That consumes mental energy and can create a sense of mental chaos. On the feedback side, feeling mentally chaotic or anxious often manifests outwardly as disorganization – you might neglect cleaning up or fall behind in filing, creating a vicious cycle.

However, positive feedback loops can be created by intentional order. For example, establishing a daily routine (a morning ritual, a set time for planning, etc.) conditions the mind towards clarity. It’s a reinforcing loop: a small initial change – say, clearing your desk at day’s end – gives a satisfying sense of closure that lowers stress, which then helps you start the next day with a clearer head, enabling further orderly behavior.

The Freedom of a Systematic Mind

We’ve explored the various ways to bring order to your life and create mental clarity. From understanding your thinking style to organizing your physical space, from brain dumping to systems thinking – each approach offers a path to greater clarity and reduced stress.

As the philosopher Blaise Pascal observed,

“Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too; this is why a great and clear mind loves ardently and sees distinctly what it loves.”

When your mind is clear, your actions become more purposeful, your decisions more sound, and your life more fulfilling.

The paradox is that structure creates freedom. By establishing systems and routines, you free up mental space for creativity, innovation, and joy. As Steve Jobs said,

“Simple can be harder than complex: you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

Start with just one aspect of this system today. Perhaps begin by identifying your thinking style, or spend 15 minutes decluttering your workspace, or try a brain dump before bed tonight. These small changes can create powerful ripple effects throughout your mental landscape.

Remember, clarity isn’t a lucky gift of temperament but a strategy – a way of operating. As Lao Tzu wisely stated,

“To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.”

By viewing personal organization as a system to manage (and not a one-time project), you continually adapt and find what works for your unique situation.

I wish you clarity and less time spent in a state of uncertainty. This will help tremendously in life and in business.