Solutions to significant problems facing modern
society demand a widespread qualitative improvement in thinking and
understanding. . .. We need a breakthrough in the quality of thinking employed by both decision makers and by each of us in our daily affairs.
—Ornstein, in Costa, 1991
Often we are confronted with a problem and we don't know how to find a solution. We think about all possible solutions but we might feel like there is no viable solution.
When we turn on the television or open a newspaper we are overthrown with politics, issues and events that happens in society daily.
Some of the news is so false it is laughable but it can often be so convincing that we don't know what is real and what is not. We ourselves get more and more confused and in the end we struggle to help our children to operate successfully in a very complex world.
When we are focused on something and we think about it, it doesn't make our thoughts rational.
Rational thinking is the ability to consider all the
relevant variables of a situation and to access, organize and analyze
relevant information to arrive at a conclusion.
Rational thinking is important, but intelligence plays a big roll in the way issues are resolved.
How do you improve your problem solving skills?
An intensive study of thought and thinking itself, is a way to improve your solution skills, but in the end, you need to arrive at a rational solution to solve a problem, and to actually do something about the problem.
Rational Thinking as a Series of Steps
Much of what you do in your daily life, involves a process of some sort. A few actions and repeatable steps are practiced to reach a specific goal.
Think about baking a cake: You need the ingredients, the
measurements, the oven, and most importantly the recipe. You need to
follow all the instructions in the recipe to bake a successful cake.
When you change a tire, there are certain steps to follow.
When you write an essay, there are certain steps to follow. Without following the correct steps, the outcome might not be desirable.
Each PROCESS requires an INPUT to produce and OUTPUT.
Let's get back to the cake. When you bake a cake you can't change the instructions because you are in a hurry. You cannot bake the cake on a higher temperature because you are either going to have a cake that is raw on the inside or a cake that is burned to a crisp.
This is the same way it works for rational thinking. There is a specific process that needs to be followed with special input to receive a proper output. You need to focus on all three these terms to get the desired outcome.
To focus only on the input cannot ensure success. Equal attention needs to be given to the process and the input, in other words how to analyze and organize and collect this data.
Once you have everything in front of you or in your mind, then you can find a proper outcome.
How do we learn to think rationally?
This is not a superpower that we are born with, so most people learn
how to think rationally through experiences. If someone asks you now how
you learned to think rationally, you might not be able to answer them.
It is also almost impossible for you to explain your rational thinking process to others.
Let’s think about a juggler. Do you think that he was born with the skill to throw balls in the air and catch it?
No, he practiced and practiced and went through hours of practice to
become a successful juggler. How do you become a pro at something?
Of course, you practice it!
An expert on a specific topic is not born with that knowledge, but worked hard
and trained a lot to become an expert in that particular field. By the
time someone becomes an expert the process of their way of thinking
becomes difficult to explain.
This expert’s thinking process still takes place, but it comes naturally and is sort of an invisible process.
Think about the following: You are put in an aeroplane and you have to fly.
How are you going to fly if you have no guidelines on how everything works? If you get the plane in the air, how are you going to land it without the proper guidance?
You can be sure that you’re going to crash the plane at some point. Now take a sixteen-year-old teenager and put them in the cockpit without any training.
With no training how do you expect them to fly?
Can you now see why teenagers have it so difficult and make so
many stupid decisions? If someone is not trained to think, how can you
expect a sixteen-year-old to even think rationally?
Who is going to teach them the basics of rational thinking?
-To be continued-
