I get it. But I've found that the less time you spend thinking things through, the more time you end up wasting later.
You make a quick call, miss something, and then spend the next few weeks dealing with the fallout.
After years of teaching and working with financials, I think being able to think clearly is one of the most useful skills in the domain. And honestly, not many people are very good at it.
We all have access to the same information now. What matters is how you make sense of it.
So how do you actually think better when you're already short on time?
Your First Thought Is Never Your Best Thought
Real thinking starts when you stay with the question a little longer instead of settling for that first answer.
I see this in class all the time. Ask a student why a company's margins are falling, and the first answer is usually something like, “Rising input costs.”
Maybe. But then ask: Which costs? Why now? Are competitors facing the same thing? What did management say on the earnings call?
That's where the real thinking starts.
The first answer comes quickly because it's familiar. The better answer takes a few more minutes.
And sometimes, that's all it takes to get somewhere most people don't.
The New Way We Stop Thinking
There's a modern shortcut that makes this worse, and I'll be honest, because I use these tools too.
In 2025, researchers at MIT's Media Lab ran a striking study.
Measuring brain activity with EEG, they found the group that leaned on AI showed the weakest brain engagement and the poorest memory. More than 80% of them couldn't quote a single line from the essay they had just produced. The researchers named it “cognitive debt.”
A separate study from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon found the same pattern at work. The more people trusted the AI to do a task, the less critical thinking they did themselves.
This matters enormously in finance.
Today, you can ask a model to summarise an annual report or explain a complicated idea and come away feeling like you understand it. But if you can't explain why the answer is right or defend it when someone challenges you, you probably don't understand it as well as you think.
I'm not against AI. I use it too, and I think you should. Use it to find information, organise your thoughts, or get a first draft. Don't let it conclude.
Thinking Time Is Something You Schedule
It sounds obvious, but most of us rarely do it. We fill every spare moment with a screen. The commute, the queue, the ten minutes between meetings — there's always something to check.
Thinking time doesn't usually appear by itself. You have to make room for it, just like you would for a meeting.
When I'm preparing a difficult class or working through a valuation, first principles thinking naturally kicks in. And I've found I genuinely like to think on paper, not on a screen, not in a notes app. There's something about writing by hand that slows you down enough to actually work through an idea rather than skim past it.
Some of my best thinking happens before I open my laptop. I put my phone away and spend some quiet time asking what really matters, what I might be missing, and whether I'm looking at the problem the right way.
You don't need to disappear to a cabin for a week. Give yourself thirty quiet minutes and one question that's actually worth thinking about.
Writing Is Thinking Made Visible
I've found that the easiest way to find out whether I really understand something is to write it down.
If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking.
That is Leslie Lamport, the computer scientist. Something can make perfect sense in your head, but when you try to put it into words, you suddenly realise you've skipped a step or never really worked out why you believe it.
That's why I make students write down the logic. Not paragraphs, not long explanations. Just the cause-effect chain.
Writing the chain out by hand makes you slow down and check each step. You can see whether one idea actually leads to the next, or whether you've skipped something without noticing.
Writing it out also improves retention. When you write something down by hand, you're turning the idea into your own words, which makes you think about it more deeply and helps it stick.
If they think a stock is undervalued, I want to know what they believe, why they believe it, and what could make them change their mind.
Writing makes those gaps obvious. A weak argument can feel convincing in your head, but it becomes much harder to ignore once you see it written down.
It's better to find mistakes in your thinking on paper than after you've invested real money.
Start Here
At the end, you'll have something rarer than any AI summary. A thought that is actually yours, and one you can defend.
But thinking needs raw material, and most of ours comes from what we read. That is what the next letter is about, along with how to actually remember it.
Invest in yourself,
Aswini Bajaj