The "will to think" is the persistent unwillingness or inability to lie to yourself. It requires motivation and conviction to sustain the incessant need to go deeper until you have a higher resolution on the concept.
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From How To Understand Things:
"The smartest person I’ve ever known had a habit that, as a teenager, I found striking. After he’d prove a theorem, or solve a problem, he’d go back and continue thinking about the problem and try to figure out different proofs of the same thing. Sometimes he’d spend hours on a problem he’d already solved.
I had the opposite tendency: as soon as I’d reached the end of the proof, I’d stop since I’d gotten the answer."
This habit is "the will to think", a compulsive unwillingness or inability to lie to yourself. As Richard Feynman put it: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool."
It's an incessant need to go deeper until you have a higher resolution on an idea or concept, despite the brain's natural tendency to avoid such painful and resource-intensive processes.
Nobel laureate William Shockley believed that the "will to think" is critical to success in any field, but motivation is equally essential. A Capable thinker will be reluctant to commit themselves to tedious and precise thinking unless they believe their efforts will yield meaningful outcomes. Therefore, motivation and conviction are necessary to sustain the effort involved in deep, rigorous thinking.