One of my favourite quotations is from author and success thinker Ralph Charrell.
"Avoid the crowd. Do your own thinking independently. Be the chess player, not the chess piece".
I like this idea. To often we are shepherded not just into social conformity but into intellectual conformity as well. This week the skies over Europe were largely closed due to volcanic ash sent high into the atmosphere from an Icelandic volcano. Panic ensued. Governments banned flights. For the first time since the nineteenth century the skies over England were eerily silent. Hundreds of thousands of passengers were stranded. What would be next? A regression to horses and carts?
Then the airlines, which were losing millions, lobbied for a relaxation of the ban. New data was presented. New decisions were reached. And the planes immediately took to the skies again.
Nothing had physically changed. Thinking had changed. The quality of analysis, evaluation and reaction had changed.
Tony Robbins often speaks of people being held back by limiting beliefs. He is right. Many of these beliefs served a reasonable purpose at the time they were created and reinforcement has made them a self-fulfilling prophecy. But any real change will need those beliefs to be revisited and re-examined. The un-examined life is not worth living, said Socrates in Apology 38a.
I have been reading an old classic recently - "Choosing the Future" by Stuart Wells. While dated in parts, this book has aged gracefully like a fine wine. It's a book about thinking. The tendency among so many of us, even those trained in lean Six Sigma techniques, is towards action, unthinking limbic system driven responses. Wells offers a cogent and lucid analysis of what it means to think critically and effectively, without being drawn into analysis-paralysis or inertia.
He offers a striking image. What would people think if at work you abandoned the phone calls, emails, and day-to-day seemingly urgently clutter of the job and actually thought, deeply, about your objectives and how to realise them. What would change as a result? Wells offers the following revelations:
1. We do not teach thinking
2. We want instant solutions and quick closure
3. We do not tolerate thinking
4. We have no patience for thinking
5. We pride ourselves on our practicality
6. We remain enslaved by our thoughts.
These insights are priceless. How many of us devote serious disciplined effort to building income streams, deploying lean Six Sigma techniques and investing in our own intellectual capital?
I leave you again with those prescient, insistent and faintly unnerving words of Ralph Charrell.
"Avoid the crowd. Do your own thinking independently. Be the chess player, not the chess piece".
Which are you?
(c) 2010 WestOcean
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