Today I Am Grateful For ... #20

Today is my last day of my last class in college.

BIG EXHALE!!!!

First lets talk about how grateful I am to be done!! I have learned so much and feel like a completely different person. I will have a Bachelor's of Science in Management to go with my Associates of Arts in Business. What will I do with all of my free time?

This class has been so great. It has been about critical thinking and ethics in life and business. Below is a REALLY long post that includes some of my favorite excerpts from the reading. While most of the concepts just seemed like common sense to me, I appreciate the confirmation of good thinking ideals.

So here it comes, the longest post I have ever done, read it or not!!

From: Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Professional and Personal Life, by Richard W. Paul and Linda Elder. Published by Financial Times, a division of Prentice Hall, Inc. Prentice-Hall is an imprint of Pearson Education, Inc. Copyright © 2002 by Pearson Education, Inc.

To live is to act. To act is to decide. Everyday life is an endless sequence of decisions. Some of the decisions are small and inconsequential, and some are large and life determining. When the pattern of decision-making is rational, we live a rational life. When the pattern is irrational, we live an irrational life. Rational decisions maximize the quality of one’s life without violating the rights, or harming the well being, of others. Rational decisions maximize our chances of happiness, successful living, and fulfillment. Critical thinking, when applied to decision-making, enhances the rationality of decisions made by raising the pattern of decision-making to the level of conscious and deliberate choice. No one deliberately chooses to live an irrational life. Many, however, subconsciously choose to live an irrational or unethical life. In doing so, they maximize their chances of unhappiness and frustration, or do harm to others in seeking their own advantage. There are as many domains of decision-making as there are of thinking. Indeed, the most important decision we can make is how and what to think about things, for how and what we think determines how we feel and how we act. We decide what to think, feel, and do when we act as a parent. We decide what to think, feel, and do when we make decisions about our professional lives. We decide what to think, feel, and do when we make decisions about the social world in which we have been raised and the groups of which we are a member (family, professional, personal associations, nation, etc.). We decide what to think, feel, and do when we make political decisions about the policies, parties, and candidates that we choose to support. We decide what to think, feel, and do when we make decisions about what we are morally obliged to do (and what we are not so obliged to do). We decide what to think, feel, and do when we make decisions about our life-style, about the nature and value of friendship, about the nature of what is most important in our lives. We decide what to think, feel, and do when we think historically, sociologically, professionally, environmentally, and philosophically. What is more, the thinking we do in one domain of our lives often is influenced by the thinking we do in other domains of our lives. Often the domains are overlapping. As a result, the decisions we make in one domain of our lives often are influenced by the decisions we make in other domains of our lives.

To become a skilled decision-maker, one must become a skilled thinker, and to become either is to learn to think about our lives both as a whole and as a complex of parts. The most intimate part of the world in which we live originates in our thoughts and actions and is maintained by these. To become a critical thinker, we must become an intimate observer of the manner in which we construct our own intimate world. We must understand how we have been socialized and the implications of that process. We must understand how our socialization is reinforced and reflected in the social institutions that continue to exert direct and indirect influence on us. We must know when we are acting out social routines and rituals that we were conditioned to accept. We must be able to think inside and outside our world, using the latter to critique the former.

Clearly, we make these decisions with immediate pleasure and our short-term satisfaction uppermost in our minds. Indeed, our mind is “wired” for immediate and short-term gratification. Taking into account the long-term requires reflection. We must raise our behavior to the level, as Piaget put it, of conscious realization. Of course, we can be conscious of a problem without taking the steps to correct it.

Putting our long-term insights into action requires self-discipline and will power. When we identify a pattern of irrational decision-making in our life, we have discovered what sometimes is called a bad habit. When we replace a pattern of irrational decision-making with a rational pattern, we replace a bad habit with a good one. The replacement is at the level of action. Because habits account for hundreds or thousands of decisions over an extended time, we can improve our decision-making significantly by identifying our bad habits and replacing them with good ones. For example, we can make hundreds of rational decisions over time by making the decision to eat healthy foods and not eat unhealthy foods. Once that decision is manifested in behavior over an extended time, it results in a productive habit.

The four keys to sound decision-making are:
1. To recognize that you face an important decision.
2. To accurately identify the alternatives,
3. To logically evaluate the alternatives,
4. To have the self-discipline to act on the best alternative.

Each of these factors presents potential problems to the thinker.

Recognizing that a decision is at hand is not all there is to it. We also must recognize what our alternatives are. Here, many decisions go awry because of failure to accurately identify the alternatives. This failure comes in two forms: 1) thinking that something is an alternative when it is not (thinking unrealistically), and 2) failing to recognize an alternative (thinking too narrowly).

Among the common decisions in the first category of failure are decisions that follow from the following types of thinking:
• “I know he’s got major faults, but he loves me and I can help him change!”
• “I know there are lots of problems in our relationship, but we love each other and that is all that matters!”
• “I know I’m not doing well at my job, but I will eventually be recognized!”
• “I know I need to learn this, but I can learn it by cramming the night before the exam!”
The second category of failure (thinking too narrowly) is difficult to correct, as no one believes he is thinking too narrowly (when he is). Actually, the more narrow the thinker, the more confident the thinker that he is broad-minded. A good rule of thumb is that if you can think of only one or two options when making a decision, you probably are thinking too narrowly.
We have found the following twofold rule to be useful:

RULE ONE: THERE’S ALWAYS A WAY.
RULE TWO: THERE’S ALWAYS ANOTHER WAY.

Speed thinking usually does not help us think well through our decisions. The more things we try to do simultaneously, and the faster we try to do them, the more likely we will be to do each of the things poorly. Because we live in a fast-paced world, it is difficult to appreciate the importance of taking our time in reasoning through the decisions we face. After making a bad decision, we sometimes say we didn’t have enough time to think through the problem. But the problem usually is that we had the time but didn’t take the time. In general, the more deliberate our approach to decision-making is—the more time we spend thinking through all the aspects of the problem—the better will be our decisions.

By using the elements of thought as our guide, we can identify at least nine dimensions of decision-making that represent potential problems for thought. These dimensions do not define a procedure that can be followed mindlessly or mechanically. They presuppose good judgment and sound thinking in every dimension. To be an effective and rational decision-maker:

1. Figure out, and regularly re-articulate, your most fundamental goals, purposes, and needs. Your decisions should help you to remove obstacles and create opportunities to reach your goals, achieve your purposes, and satisfy your needs.
2. Whenever possible, take problems and decisions one by one. State the situation and formulate the alternatives as clearly and precisely as you can.
3. Study the circumstances surrounding the alternative possible decisions to make clear the kind of decision you are dealing with. Figure out what implications follow from the various possible alternatives before you. Differentiate decisions over which you have some control and decisions that seem forced on you. Concentrate your efforts on the most important decisions and those on which you can have the most impact.
4. Figure out the information you need, and actively seek that information.
5. Carefully analyze and interpret the information you collect, drawing what reasonable inferences you can.
6. Figure out your options for action. What can you do in the short term? In the long term? Recognize explicitly your limitations in money, time, and power.
7. Evaluate your options in the situation, taking into account their advantages and disadvantages.
8. Adopt a strategic approach to the decision, and follow through on that strategy. This may involve direct action or a carefully thought-through wait-and-see strategy.
9. When you act, monitor the implications of your action as they begin to emerge. Be ready to revise your strategy at a moment’s notice if the situation requires. Be prepared to shift your strategy or your analysis or statement of the kind of decision, or all three, as more information about the decision becomes available to you.

Skilled critical thinkers regularly revisit their conceptions of what is worth pursuing. Very often, we make poor decisions simply because we are pursuing what we ought not to pursue. For example, if you define your happiness in terms of controlling the lives and decisions of the key persons in your life, you are bound to make poor decisions both for yourself and for those whom you seek to control. Humans often seek excess—excess of wealth (greed), excess of power (domination), excess of food (an unhealthy body). And humans often make unreasonable demands on others—assuming that everyone believes what they believe, values what they value, and should act as they act. Humans often set up inconsistent standards—expecting others to be satisfied with what they themselves would not be satisfied with, or to be judged by criteria that they would resent were that same criteria applied to themselves.