Book Review: Think Like a Freak

By Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

In our day and age it’s fair to say that we are faced with many serious problems, most of them fiendishly difficult to solve. How can we safely create nuclear fusion? How can we predict earthquakes far enough ahead of time to evacuate vulnerable towns and cities? How do you squeeze the last bit of toothpaste out of the tube?

In Think Like a Freak, Steven Levitt, an economist from the University of Chicago and Stephen Dubner, a prominent national journalist and author, we learn how to adopt a mindset that enables us to approach difficult problems in an unconventional manner.

Most easy problems, Messrs. Levitt and Dubner explain, are not that hard to solve with fairly conventional thinking. Indeed, there is a reason that conventional thinking is…well…conventional. In most cases that’s precisely what you need. It’s the really difficult problems that requires novel approaches in order to solve them. The first step one must go through in order to move past conventional thinking, the authors argue, is to utter the three hardest words in the English language: “I don’t know”. Children can do this without too much difficulty, but as they grow older they discover that in our society it is generally better to pretend that you have the answer and then be proved wrong at a later date than admit that you don’t have a clue about something. The authors offer a simple example of this. If an analyst makes a prediction that the stock market will triple in twelve months, and this prediction turns out to be true, a hugely lucrative job at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey awaits you. If you turn out to be completely wrong, odds are that people will quickly forget you even made the prediction in the first place.

The second, and much harder step, is to temporarily let go of your moral compass. This needs to be done because otherwise you might be convinced that the answers to a given problem are obvious, and you will be unable to approach the problem objectively. Having admitted your ignorance and let go of morality the third step is to gain valuable feedback. All great discoveries have been preceded by dismal failures, it is only by failing and learning from those mistakes that we can finally succeed. However, to fully learn from failure one must first be aware of how little they know, and be free from every form of prejudice and preconceived notion.  

One compelling and potentially lucrative reason to read Think Like a Freak is that it can launch you into a new career as a competitive hot dog eater. In 2000, a young Japanese man named Takeru Kobayashi was struggling to pay rent and needed to supplement his meagre income. He decided to enroll in a hot dog eating competition on Coney Island, where first prize netted you five thousand dollars. Kobayashi was a man of slight stature, with no previous history of gluttony. The chances of him breaking the previous hot dog eating record, which stood at 25 and one eight hot dog eaten in only twelve minutes, seemed slim at best. However, Kobayashi reckoned that if his personal childhood hero, the great sumo champion Chiyonofuji “the Wolf” compensated for his light weight with superior technique, he could do the same. For months Kobayashi devoted himself to the art of competitive eating, taping his training sessions with a video camera, while eating hot dogs made from minced fish since he couldn’t find the regular version in Japan. Kobayashi won that year’s tournament in a landslide, eating a record fifty hot dogs in twelve minutes, and he proceeded to win the competition for four years in a row. How was this possible? Most competitive eaters, burly frat bros who looked like they could wolf down Kobayashi himself in one sitting, all ate their hot dogs using the same technique. The rammed the hot dog into their mouth, chewed furiously and swallowed it down with a gulp of water. Kobayashi’s brilliance was due to the fact that he approached the whole ordeal in a different way. Kobayashi broke the hot dogs, both sausage and bun, in half, then let the hot dogs slide down his throat before dunking the buns in water to make them easier to swallow. Seems simple enough, but before Kobayashi came along, none of the competitive eaters had dared admit to themselves that perhaps they didn’t know the best way to eat hot dogs quickly, and none had dropped their preconceived notions as to how this was best accomplished.   

Think Like a Freak is a fascinating read, Messrs. Levitt and Dubner offers a fresh perspective on how one might break from established norms and solve problems by going off the beaten path. I’m reminded of Peter Senge’s management classic The Fifth Discipline, where he teaches the importance of understanding how mental models guide the behaviors of different actors. Often when confronted by a problem that is difficult to solve, we tend to go down the path of least resistance and apply conventional thinking to solve it, but in some situations that may not be enough. Those who aren’t afraid to embrace their inner freak may hatch a dozen mad schemes that never pan out, but occasionally they will come up with an idea that is utterly brilliant and ground breaking. After all, if the likes of Leonardo da Vinci, Nicola Tesla and the Wright brothers had been afraid of unconventional thinking, we might have had to do without many of the inventions that we take for granted.