Think About It

This is an excerpt from my new book Think About It.

My dad was a management consultant. Every week for many years my Dad would put out a new letter to his clients. Every letter ended with the same phrase, “Think About It”

What he meant was ‘consider this’. He wanted his clients to do a little critical thinking and evaluation about what he had written. How did it relate to them specifically or did it at all. For him, it wasn’t about what to think for him. It was about how to think.

As you read each piece in this book, this is my approach. I too am interested in people thinking. Really and truly considering an idea. Too many people in this world cannot or do not think for themselves. They only consider life through what they have been taught by authority figures like parents, teachers, bosses and ministers. This isn’t thinking. It is regurgitation. Repeating what we have heard without considering whether or not something is valid.

When something is invalid but we have accepted it, it runs like a virus on a computer. It is running on stealth. We don’t know it is there coloring our experience. Something undesirable occurs. It leaves a mark on our Consciousness.

Our lives are lived from the inside out. I remember going to a movie with my dad years ago. I later heard him relating what he had gleaned from the movie to some of his clients. I was floored by what he was saying, because I had seen the same movie at the same time, but my recollection of the story plot and my takeaway was completely different.

Why? How could this occur? It happened because we each had different constructs in our consciousness. We had grown up at different times and had taken on differing belief systems. Therefore when we saw the film, the meaning of what we were seeing, at exactly the same time and place, was very different.

This is how life unfolds and why we need to question and evaluate everything we take in — everything we have been told by our parents, teachers, ministers, boss etc. Check it for validity. Some things change with the times. My telephone no longer has a cord attached to a jack in the wall. In my youth my stereo system was gigantic with enormous. Speakers. Now it is in my cell phone. A corded phone is not “wrong” per se, but it isn’t very useful anymore either, and I definitely do not have room for a giant stereo. Amusingly television screens got much bigger.

The first thing we need to understand are constructs. What is a construct? Constructs are the subjective beliefs we create in our own mind. Constructs are our belief systems. The collected beliefs we have acquire during our lifetime. They are often not based on any empirical evidence. It is our viewpoint of the world, colored by information we have been fed and it is entirely an internal process.

The funny thing is it doesn’t work to simply show someone what is correct. This can actually make someone dig in their heals about an issue or belief. One has to be willing to really consider the validity of an issue to change their mind. The more data they are given to the contrary of a long-held belief, the more stubbornly they hold on to that belief.

Here is what I am asking you to do. Look at your beliefs and ask yourself some of these questions:

  • What do I believe about this?

  • Are there any exceptions?

  • Is it true in all situations?

  • Am I being biased by something?

I want you to think. This is all I am suggesting. You might find yourself surprised by your conclusions This one is very important. No one is wrong 100 percent of the time. As my dad used to say even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then. Bias can be religious, political, gender oriented, based on your education… the list is endless.

One of my favorite examples of this is a story I have heard many times in my life. I do not know who the original story teller was, but I share it with you today. It is called “The Story of the Pot Roast”. It is the story of a young woman preparing a roast. As she was preparing dinner one afternoon, her husband was in the kitchen with her. He watched her take the roast out of the packaging and cut off a slice at either end before putting it onto the roaster pan. Intrigued, he asked his wife what the purpose was for cutting the ends off the roast.

She stopped for a minute and thought about it, “I don’t know. I learned to cook from my mother and the always did it”. Her curiosity was peaked, so she called her mom. “Mom,” she said, “Why do we always cut the ends of the roast before roasting it?”.

Her mom was silent for a moment then replied, “I don’t really know. I never thought about it. I learned to do that from my mother”. Now they were both intrigued and called the grandmother. The young woman’s mother asked her mother why she always cut the ends of the roast. Grandmother replied, “Oh! That is because it was too big for my roasting pan”.

We are all guilty of this. We are all doing things a certain way because we were taught to do it a certain way without explanation. We learn from an example and we do not understand the meaning of the example. Are you cutting a roast at both ends and don’t have any idea of the purpose?

Or maybe you have changed something, not realizing there was a purpose behind how something was done that was never explained to you or you do not understand the purpose. Same problem.

This story illustrates how we often just accept what we are shown or told by someone who we trust without question. The answer was valid for the grandmother. Everyone else followed suit because that was how it was always done. It is a good lesson for everyone of us.

I want you to think and practice critical thinking. What is critical thinking? It is an objective analysis of an issue in order to form a judgment. Not to roll around ideas you have collected but to actually evaluate your beliefs and see if they hold water. You are going to find that many of them may not. Don’t let this disturb you. It will free you and take you places you have never dreamed of.