I’ve long been curious about the thinking habits of other people. What does a psychologist think about when she’s socializing with friends? Does she pick up little clues about their psyches that the rest of us miss? What does a professional dancer think about when he’s watching Swan Lake – or Dancing with the Stars? Does he notice technical and artistic points that I don’t understand?

Today I have a story about a person who was thinking about another person who was thinking – both in unusual ways.

The college where I was teaching invited noted educator Vincent Tinto to spend a day talking to faculty and staff about student retention. During the break, a librarian friend and I compared notes. She was as impressed with Tinto as I was, and she added something: “I’m wondering if he studied to be a Jesuit.”

Huh?

Jesuits are members of the Society of Jesus, a prestigious Roman Catholic religious order for men that emphasizes education. Tinto hadn’t mentioned religion.

“It’s the way he thinks,” she said. (Although she wasn’t Roman Catholic, she’d been a librarian at a Jesuit high school.) “Before he answers a question, he puts it into a larger context.”

We went back into the meeting room, and she was right – Tinto reframed every question before he answered it. Later that day I Googled him and found that my friend was also right about the Jesuit connection: Tinto had a degree in physics from Fordham University, a Jesuit institution in New York. (I once took a course at Fordham myself, but – alas – I don’t think it had any permanent effect on my brain.)

I have another story about thinking-about-a-thinker, and then I want to apply this idea to writing. A few years ago, when I was helping a friend edit a book about Bernard Shaw’s ideas about women, I started thinking about my own encounters with feminism.

My starting point had been Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which I read in high school shortly after it was published. (It’s still one of my favorite books, and later I was thrilled to learn that Friedan did a lot of her writing at that most sacred of places, the New York Public Library.)

Odd, I thought – Friedan’s thinking was much like Shaw’s: She was interested in the ways that society manipulates women’s thinking to further its own ends. And suddenly I realized she must have been exposed to Marx in her youth. (Shaw’s penchant for critiquing ideologies was a direct result of his Marxism.) Perhaps, I mused, she’d had a boyfriend who was heavily into Marx.

I headed for the library and started searching through the early chapters of Friedan’s autobiography, Life So Far. And there it was: She’d been a fervent Marxist during her college years. (Incidentally, the early years in a famous person’s life are almost always the most interesting part of any biography. Maybe that’s another reason I keep reading The Little Princesses.)

Those of us who write, edit, and teach so often get sidetracked from what really matters: thinking. A teaching colleague – Ellen Massey – once remarked that our developmental writing courses were really courses in thinking. She was right, and it was an insight that had a powerful effect on what I was trying to accomplish with my students.

What about you, reading this? Who influenced your thinking? What thinking habits are unique to you?

There’s nothing – I repeat, nothing – like a powerful idea to energize and empower your writing. (Those of us who teach writing know that we get much better papers from our students when we give them something stimulating to think about.)

If you want to get to know yourself better (and perhaps find some unexpected springboards for writing), start journaling about thinking. I know that’s not very specific advice. That’s because you need to start from your unique perspective, not mine. If you’re not sure where to start, think about your role models – people you’ve admired not for what they know, but how they think. (Some of you already know how impressed I am by Carolyn Hax’s unusual take on everyday problems in her Washington Post advice column.)

You have an exciting journey ahead of you!