I want these messages to influence not only your discipline but also how you think — not what you think, but how you think. Because bad thinking is a big problem.
The world is more complex than ever. High-quality thinking is essential to our stability, strength, and survival. Unfortunately, low-quality thinking dominates the landscape.
High-quality thinking is rare because it is unfashionable. Good thinking is not celebrated or revered. It gets resented, ridiculed, and rejected in favor of reactionary, crowd-appeasing, lousy thinking.
The problem with bad thinking is that it doesn’t know it is bad. It possesses a terrible and devastating combo: lack of awareness and discipline with an excess of unearned confidence.
In other words, people who don’t get it don’t understand they don’t get it. They confuse the strength of their opinion with the quality of their thinking: “I’ve been thinking about this a lot and feel strongly. Therefore, my perspective must be valid.”
Flawed thinking does not guarantee the “wrong” decision, just as good thinking does not guarantee the “right” decision.
But bad thinking inevitably results in net bad decisions and dangerous consequences, while good thinking inevitably results in net good decisions and beneficial consequences.
Too many people in too many places have too often become blind to the difference between high-quality thinking (good) and low-quality thinking (bad). Or they lack the courage to call out lousy thinking, confront it, challenge it, and defeat it with better thinking.
None of this is new to society. Only the environment, channels, volume, and players involved have changed.
The world will never be less complex than it is today. It is only getting more complicated.
We must elevate the quality of our thinking. Otherwise, this complexity will consume us, and we will destroy ourselves.
Brick by brick. Do the work.
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