I've been thinking a lot about a particular pattern I've noticed among people. It seems like there are two main types of people: thinkers and builders.

My immediate experiential assessment of this trend is that it’s binary, which I’m hesitant to believe because it feels like nothing in this world ever is. I can think of tons of examples of people in my life who are most definitely in one category or another. Upon further thought, however, I can also think of people who are not in either and who seem like they're in both, and I'm concluding that it is a spectrum. Even though I myself identify strongly as a thinker, I do have some qualities of a maker. I feel like it's a spectrum with a bimodal distribution, having a peak at each end.

So what classifies someone as a thinker or a builder?

I spent some time trying to separate what are symptoms of the traits vs what actually defines them. Here’s my theory: it’s defined by temperament. People are wired one way or the other (how much of it is attributed to nature vs nurture is beyond me, that’s a neurological and psychological research question). This temperament then determines what people naturally gravitate towards, where their internal motivation lies, and what comes easily to them. (In short, what people do with their time.)

Separately, people have values that determine how they feel about what they do. If a person’s values and their innate temperament are aligned, a person is free to create and work as they see fit. If they’re misaligned, it’s a source of friction, leading to feelings of inadequacy, frustration, etc. For example, if someone is naturally a thinker but grew up being taught that physical output is what matters most, they will expend effort on trying to produce it, but struggle to do so more than natural builders. Such work may feel particularly difficult or unenjoyable, leading to feeling lazy or insecure about their output. Where internal motivation runs out is a key indicator of what is naturally interesting to a person.

Such value assessments tend to happen subconsciously (they’re constantly happening btw - think of the last time you felt frustrated about something. Did you stop to ask why you were frustrated? Which of your values led you to feel that it was not right?). I think becoming conscious of the values and the assessments is the way to reduce friction and insecurities, especially if the values and the innate temperament are not aligned.

What people actually spend their time doing (dreaming up projects? Reading books? Sewing? Being a manager? Being a doctor? Reading the news?) is a symptom of their classification and also of the strength of their values.

What do you think the American culture’s values say about thinking vs building? My essay on boredom suggests we as a society place more value on building (“Ideas are cheap, execution is everything”). I don’t know if this is a good or bad thing. If too much value is placed on thinking, nothing gets done, but if the opposite is true, then we end up with shitty results (if we spent more time thinking about cars before building them, we wouldn’t have destroyed the environment so much).

Also on boredom - I talked about unstructured time. Initial voluntary boredom does inherently mean doing some thinking, but then I think builders will naturally gravitate towards some project to work on, whereas thinkers will stay in the thinking phase. (The definition of unstructured “bored” time is having no predetermined plan or external pressures on how the time is spent.) What will you do if given two hours of time, with absolutely no instructions on what to do with it?

Are you a builder or a thinker?
Are your values aligned?