Henrik Rodgers - Master Critical Thinking

Master Critical Thinking

Learn To Think Intelligently, Improve Problem-Solving Skills, Make Better Analysis, and Upgrade Your Life

Henrik Rodgers

Introduction

I remember the first time I had enough money to buy a car. Like most other teenagers, after high school, the best car I could afford was a used one. Still, that didn't stop me from dreaming big and wanting the most automobile that I can get for every dollar that I had to spend.

Me and my brother would go through the used car listings of many classified sites that featured cars for sale in my area. After several days of going through several selections and narrowing it all down, I had my eyes on two remaining contenders. Everything else was either too expensive or there was obviously something wrong with them.

One model came from a line of fairly decent racing cars. This brand has often been associated with racing and sports cars. The other model was a sportier version of a fairly decent car line.

My brother was more practical than me. He told me that I should pay close attention to the maintenance history as well as overall wear and tear of whichever car I buy. With his help, I was able to check out both cars.

The first car, in hindsight, looked a little bit beat up. Its best years obviously were behind it. But still, I just fell in love with the fact that if I spent my hard-earned dollars with this unit, I would actually own this very famous brand.

The other car was in better shape. It also had its maintenance records in order. Everything checked out. When we looked under the hood, it seemed that it was well maintained.

What do you think happened next? That's right. Being a teenager, I went with my heart. I went with the sporty reputation behind the brand of the first car.

In other words, I was not looking at facts. I let my emotions get the better of me.

It's not like I stopped thinking. I knew what was going on. But in my head, the fact that I got to own this very special and historic automotive brand meant more than other more objective considerations.

Fast forward six months and, you guessed it, I found myself at our local corner store mechanics garage. My car had to go to the repair shop because of wear and tear issues.

Well, I let that slide. But soon enough, after about three months, I found myself back at the mechanic shop. And this time, I was facing $3,000 in transmission repairs.

When I asked the mechanic if there was a chance that my car's other systems would experience trouble, he said there may be a good chance because the car, it turns out, was really badly maintained.

At that point, I started to think critically. I wasn't thinking critically before, but the choice before me now was pretty stark.

I spent a total of $6,000 on the car. It's going to cost $3,000 for the transmission, and there is a high probability that it's going to cost thousands of dollars more should other parts of the car go south.

At this point, I basically decided to cut my losses and trade in the car for a brand-new unit.

Now, don't get excited. The brand-new car was definitely less sexy and definitely did not have the kind of automotive engineering pedigree of my trade-in. Still, this was a very hard lesson learned.

I was ready, willing and eager to trade in my youthful dreams of driving around in a car that had a very prestigious logo in exchange for something more trustworthy and dependable.

My experience taught me that a little bit of critical thinking can definitely go a long way.

Critical thinking involves being able to look at facts and come to hard conclusions. Often times, these conclusions don't line up with what we would like or what we would expect. Often times, they come with quite a bit of a negative or ambivalent emotion. Still, critical thinking is crucial because they help us make better informed decisions.

Critical Thinking and the Power of Facts

A lot of people are under the impression that when you are forming an opinion or analyzing a set of stimuli, that you are automatically thinking. The problem is, for the most part, you are just operating out of preexisting opinions.

In other words, you already started with the conclusion and you're just trying to plug in facts that would support the conclusion that you already had. This is the mirror opposite of critical thinking.

Critical thinking requires a certain level of personal maturity because you cannot step up to the facts with a preexisting explanation or conclusion that unites or makes sense of the facts. In other words, you let the facts lead you to the conclusion instead of you coming in with some sort of preset idea or agenda.

This is what gets a lot of people in trouble because the whole idea of maturity is that you only need to see certain patterns and you can safely jump to conclusions. While that may apply in many areas of life, it doesn't apply across the board. And in the areas that it doesn't apply, it can lead to a tremendous amount of trouble.

In this book, I'm going to teach you the basics of critical thinking and how you can overcome your natural tendency to use your biases, prejudices and preconceptions to lead you to the conclusion that you think you already know.

The scary thing about critical thinking is that it requires you to step outside of your ego. It really does. It requires you to let go of your comfort zone on both intellectual and emotional bases.

This is not always easy. If your pride and ego are tied into your ability to make snap decisions or you are a particularly lazy thinker, this is going to be quite difficult.

Now, of course, in many areas of life, critical thinking may not be all that welcome or even necessary. For example, if a friend of yours was coming to you because she just broke up with her boyfriend of ten years, she may actually just need a shoulder to cry on and a sounding board.

Nine times out of ten, people in that type of situation are not really looking to solve their problem. They're just looking for another person to physically be there and give them emotional support. They're looking for somebody to just listen to them as they try to sort through their issues.

They're not exactly looking for you to slice and dice and logically analyze their issues. In fact, in many cases, relationships are often strained when the person looking for comfort feels that he or she is being put on the spot or even judged.

With that said, there are many other areas of life where a little bit of critical thinking can definitely go a long way. If you want to make better decisions, if you want to be a more effective leader, if you want to process the tons of information that you are subjected to in the space of any given day, you need to practice critical thinking.

Now, what makes this a little bit difficult is that critical thinking mastery varies from person to person. Not all of us have the same IQ. Not all of us come from the same background. Not all of us deal with the same material every single day.

Some people need critical thinking skills so they can become better creators. In that context, critical thinking involves creative impulses and making the right creative judgments that lead to more optimal outcomes.

Other people work with material that requires objective analysis. Maybe you are a scientist, or maybe you work at an engineering firm.