Thinking about thinking

Thinking is hard but useful, it consume energy. Should we treat thinking as part of the process of achieving some other things, or just simply treat it as a seperate goal? A lot of scientists, or at least some scientists always emphasize the habits and importance of thinking, and one of them(I don’t remember the exact name, but I think he is a well-known physician) talks specifically about thinking as a process of imagining. Sometimes I got the same feeling. When coding, thes most effective way for me is always to start represent instances of class as blocks in my mind and visualize the interaction. Some subjects, such as geometry or Computer Graphics or even frontend automatically have a good visualization, making them easy to think than others like trignometry(even in trig we use unit circle to calculate sin and cos values).

Let’s say if we think, imagine and visualize in our brain everyday and deliberately do training on it, it seems like we will about to get what we called “smarter”. This supports the “thinking as goal” idea and it does make a lot of sense to me. But in some cases, if you want to learn to do practical things, it’s more based on things that don’t need thinking. Some of them are based on experience(I would say model training/vibe coding), and other is just time-consuming but have no thinking involved. This could potentially make us dumb but could be more “useful” in real life. So which one should we actually choose.