Honing your own well-reasoned opinions is key to thinking for yourself, allowing you to engage with ideas on your own terms.
"Poor Charlie's Almanack" is a collection of insightful speeches from the late, great investor Charlie Munger. My favorite feature of the book is that after each transcript, Munger revisits his words, critiquing what he'd change if he were to give the speech again.
For the most part, he states he wouldn't change anything. This isn't because he isn't trying to, he's critiquing his work harder than any reader. It's just that Charlie went so in depth to the bedrock level of his assumptions and covered every base of his thinking. So the fact that his speeches remain valid decades later is a testament to Charlie's ability as a thinker and speaker.
It appears to think like Munger, you have to be willing to keep questioning your opinions, even ones you've had for a long time and shared publicly.
The process for forming/solidifying these opinions is:
As clearly and concisely as possible, express your thoughts
Critique and edit them until you get to a point where you wouldn't change anything
Revisit occasionally to see if anything has changed
Munger's continuation of this practice into his late 90s demonstrates that there's no shortcut to independent thinking, nor a point where one becomes "good enough" to stop. It's best to embrace this process, as thinking for yourself is inherently liberating, and one should prefer a life lived free rather than easy.
