THINKDROP 32: If you read shit, you think shit!
- Pierre Stanghellini
- Feb 6
- 5 min read
>On Mental Diets, Cognitive Discipline, and Strategic Clarity
🎤 From Me to You
If You Read Shit, You Think Shit
Let’s start with an uncomfortable truth.
What you consume intellectually becomes what you think. What you think becomes how you decide. And how you decide determines whether you build something that lasts — or something fragile.
We live in an era of infinite information and near-zero quality control. A world where noise is abundant, emotions are weaponized, and thinking is increasingly outsourced.
Timelines decide what you see. Algorithms decide what you feel. Trends decide what you talk about.
If you don’t actively protect your mind, someone else will gladly occupy it.
Clickbait headlines. Outrage-driven feeds. Hot takes optimized to trigger, not to teach.
This is not harmless.
If you read shit, you think shit. And if you think shit, you make shit decisions.
For entrepreneurs, leaders, and builders, this isn’t philosophy. It’s survival.
Let’s dig in.
Pierre Stanghellini -
HARi.wtf founder
Your Brain Is Your Core Asset
Not your pitch deck. Not your tech stack. Not even your network.
Your brain is your highest-leverage asset. It’s where strategy is born, where risks are weighed, and where long-term bets are placed.Yet most people leave it exposed.
Unlimited scrolling. Unfiltered opinions. Emotion-heavy narratives.
No quality control. No intentionality. No digestion.
You wouldn’t run a high-performance engine on contaminated fuel. So why do it with the one system that decides everything?
Try this: Audit your last 7 days of content consumption. Write down what you read, watched, or listened to — and ask yourself what it actually improved.
Information Is Never Neutral
There is no such thing as neutral information.
Every message has an angle, an incentive, and a beneficiary.
The most important question is often ignored: Who benefits if I believe this?
Fear spreads faster than facts. Anger outperforms nuance. Certainty beats rigor.
Entrepreneurial thinking requires distance over immediacy, structure over emotion, and analysis over reaction.
If you let emotionally charged narratives steer your thinking, you’re no longer leading — you’re reacting.
Try this: When content triggers a strong emotion, pause. Don’t share, don’t comment. Ask yourself what is missing — and what would seriously contradict it.
Read Less. Read Better.
Trends are designed for engagement, not for depth. What everyone is reading is rarely what you should be reading.
Strong mental diets have common traits:
Fewer sources
Slower pace
Higher standards
Books beat feeds. Primary sources beat commentary. Timeless ideas beat trending opinions.
We should live surrounded by books. Physical books. And yes — even digital readers (as much as I personally dislike them).
Not for aesthetics. For availability.
A book within reach creates mental snacking — short, nourishing intellectual moments instead of empty scrolling.
Try this: Place books everywhere you spend time: bedside table, office, bag. Make reading the default frictionless option.
Control Your Digital Intake Like a CEO
Be ruthless.
Personally:
I have no alerts on my phone
I cut Facebook four years ago
I treat social platforms as tools, not environments
I don't watch TV anymore
Noise accumulates. Silence compounds.
Quiet is not emptiness. It is cognitive space.
Throughout the day, I deliberately replace noise with calm — often through quiet classical music playing in the background. Not to entertain, but to slow the tempo of thought.
Insight rarely appears in chaos.
It emerges in calm, repeated moments of stillness.
In that case, my personal taste lies between Bach's Cello pieces and Hildegard von Bingen's sacred music.
Try this: Introduce quiet classical music during your day .
Let it stabilize your pace rather than stimulate it.
Thinking Is Not Feeling
Feeling strongly about something is not the same as understanding it.
Modern content blurs that line on purpose.
Rigor means:
Holding two opposing ideas without rushing to choose
Questioning narratives you agree with
Slowing down when emotions accelerate
Strategic thinkers delay judgment. Delay is a competitive advantage.
Try this: When you feel the urge to take a position instantly, force a 24-hour delay before forming an opinion.
Feed the Brain. Literally.
Mental performance is biological.
Sleep matters. Movement matters. Nutrition matters.
I treat my brain as both a cognitive and physical system:
Balanced nutrition
Targeted supplementation
Energy stability over stimulation
Clarity beats intensity. Consistency beats hacks.
You can’t think clearly in a system you neglect.
Try this: Optimize for energy stability, not peaks. Reduce stimulants. Increase sleep consistency.
The Recap:
Your mind reflects your inputs — low-quality content creates low-quality decisions.
Information is never neutral — always ask who benefits from the story you’re being told.
Books beat feeds — depth, slowness, and friction are strategic advantages.
Silence is productive — empty time is where insight compounds.
The brain is biological — sleep, food, movement, and consistency are non‑negotiable.
Food for Thought
Every night, I end my day with at least 15 minutes of book reading.
No phone. No feeds.
On my bedside table, there is always a small intellectual ecosystem, like:
The last Christmas gift from my son — a book on the most important geographic maps in history
A book on art during the German occupation in France
Essays and stories around Isaac Asimov
Worlds imagined by Robin Hobb
Timeless journeys from Jules Verne
A book on smart data, among others
Different eras. Different lenses. Different depths.
So I can choose based on my mental state.
Because reading is not about discipline. It’s about alignment.
The greatest wealth my children will inherit is not financial. It’s our library.
If you audited your information diet the same way you audit your finances…
What would you cut? What would you invest in?
In the end, you don’t rise to the level of your ambitions.
You sink to the level of your inputs.
Protect your mind. Feed it deliberately.
Because the quality of your thinking will always cap the quality of your life — and your business.
And remember: If you read shit, you think shit.
Pierre Stanghellini
→ Let’s connect, drop me a line directly at pierre@hari.wtf .
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About the Creator
Pierre Stanghellini is a creative strategist, systems thinker, and curator of mental rabbit holes. He created Thinkdrop Weekly to feed the brains that don’t want the same old Business advice. If you’re building something bold, beautiful, or strange—this is your corner of the internet.
About HARi.wtf
HARi.wtf is a creative strategy studio for businesses that hate business-as-usual.
Born in Hong Kong, in 2017, we work with restless founders, operators, and teams who’d rather break things thoughtfully than grow them blandly. We don’t do generic decks or bloated strategies—we build clarity, guts, and traction.
From street-level restaurants to global brands, from Asia to Europe, we help shape ideas that move fast when it matters, and slow when it counts.
→ Explore more at hari.wtf
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