"Some ways of using our thinking are really inspiring. There are people who use their thinking to race cars. People use their thinking to build rockets to the moon. It's all just a use of your thinking"
About this Quote
Nesmith is doing something very Nesmith: deflating the mystique around “thinking” by treating it like a tool you can point anywhere. Coming from a guy who was marketed as a Monkee and spent the rest of his life insisting on being taken seriously as an artist and entrepreneur, the line reads like a quiet manifesto against gatekeeping. He’s not romanticizing the mind as a sacred space; he’s describing it as an engine. Race cars, moon rockets, songwriting, making a career after being typecast - same basic fuel, different directions.
The rhetorical move is slyly leveling. By placing “race cars” next to “rockets to the moon,” he collapses the usual hierarchy of intellectual labor. One is adrenaline and spectacle, the other is national myth-making and science worship, yet he insists both are just applied cognition. That “just” is doing heavy work: it strips away prestige and intimidation. If thinking is merely something you use, then the barrier to entry isn’t IQ-as-fate but attention, practice, and permission.
There’s also a cultural timestamp in the examples. Cars and rockets are classic 20th-century icons of American ingenuity - speed, escape velocity, progress. Nesmith borrows that imagery to argue for creative agency in everyday life, not just in labs or cockpits. Underneath the calm tone is a pushback at any system that tells you certain kinds of thinking count more than others. He’s making the mind feel portable: less like a credential, more like a steering wheel.
The rhetorical move is slyly leveling. By placing “race cars” next to “rockets to the moon,” he collapses the usual hierarchy of intellectual labor. One is adrenaline and spectacle, the other is national myth-making and science worship, yet he insists both are just applied cognition. That “just” is doing heavy work: it strips away prestige and intimidation. If thinking is merely something you use, then the barrier to entry isn’t IQ-as-fate but attention, practice, and permission.
There’s also a cultural timestamp in the examples. Cars and rockets are classic 20th-century icons of American ingenuity - speed, escape velocity, progress. Nesmith borrows that imagery to argue for creative agency in everyday life, not just in labs or cockpits. Underneath the calm tone is a pushback at any system that tells you certain kinds of thinking count more than others. He’s making the mind feel portable: less like a credential, more like a steering wheel.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
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