Edward De Bono - How to Have a Beautiful Mind

contents

About the Book

Use the power of creative thinking to become more attractive with a makeover for your mind!

We spend a fortune on clothes, cosmetics, diets and work-outs even surgery to make our bodies more attractive. Yet we hardly consider the one thing that enhances everyones appeal. It costs nothing, takes very little time, and without it even the most physically beautiful person will be unattractive: it is a beautiful mind. No matter how stunning you are, if your mind is dull you have no hope of impressing people in any situation.

It doesnt need a high IQ, or reams of knowledge, or a great personality. All it needs is creativity, imagination and empathy all techniques that anyone can learn. Here Edward de Bono, world-famous for changing the way people think, shows you in clear, practical language how to impress people with simple conversational tactics.

Want to be irresistible? Then follow de Bonos advice: you wont believe how much it can revolutionise your life until you do.

About the Author

Edward de Bono is the leading authority in the field of creative thinking and the direct teaching of thinking as a skill. While there are thousands of people writing software for computers, Edward de Bono is the pioneer in writing software for the human brain. From an understanding of how the human brain works as a self-organising information system, he derived the formal creative tools of lateral thinking. He is also the originator of parallel thinking and the Six Thinking Hats. His tools for perceptual thinking (CoRT and DATT) are widely used in both schools and business.

Edward de Bonos instruction in thinking has been sought by many of the leading corporations in the world such as IBM, Microsoft, Prudential, BT (UK), NTT (Japan), Nokia (Finland) and Siemens (Germany). The Australian national cricket team also sought his help and became the most successful cricket team in history.

A group of academics in South Africa included Dr de Bono as one of the 250 people who had most influenced humanity in the whole course of history. A leading Austrian business journal chose him as one of the twenty visionaries alive today. The leading consultancy company, Accenture, chose him as one of the fifty most influential business thinkers today.

Edward de Bonos methods are simple but powerful. The use of just one method produced 21,000 ideas for a steel company in one afternoon. He has taught thinking to Nobel prize winners and Downs syndrome youngsters.

Edward de Bono holds an MD (Malta), MA (Oxford), DPhil (Oxford), PhD (Cambridge) and DDes (RMIT). He has had faculty appointments at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, London and Harvard and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. He has written 67 books with translations into 37 languages.

Also by Edward de Bono

The Six Value Medals

Lateral Thinking

Six Thinking Hats

introduction

WHAT IS A BEAUTIFUL MIND?

There is this beautiful woman at a cocktail party. She has flawless skin, elegant clothes and a perfect figure. Surprisingly, she seems to be much on her own. People come up to her and quickly drift away.

Then there is this short, balding and mousy man. He is always surrounded by people in animated conversation with him.

What is going on?

You can do a great deal to make your body more beautiful. There are exercises at the gym. There are nips and tucks and liposuction and inserts.

You can do much to make your face more beautiful with cosmetics and even plastic surgery. A man can have hair implants.

But what about your mind? Do you make any effort at all to have a beautiful mind? Great physical beauty with a boring mind is boring. You might get attention but you will never keep that attention.

At the cocktail party the beautiful woman had a boring mind and the mousy man had a beautiful mind. That is why the man got more attention than the woman.

So what can you do to make your mind more beautiful?

You are born with a certain shape of face and body. There is only a certain amount you can do to make them more beautiful. But there is very much more that you can do to make your mind more beautiful. That is exactly what this book is about. This book tells you what to do to make your mind more beautiful.

If you have natural physical beauty it is a tragedy to waste this beauty by having a boring mind. It is like buying an expensive car and then not putting fuel in the tank.

If you do not have great natural beauty, one of the things you can do to make yourself attractive is to develop a beautiful mind.

As you get older, physical beauty tends to fade. But beauty of mind is independent of age and can actually increase with wisdom and experience.

Many people spend a great deal of time, effort and money to make themselves more physically beautiful. It makes sense to spend some time and effort to make your mind more beautiful.

What is beauty? Beauty is something that can be appreciated by others. The beautiful mind described in this book is a mind that can be appreciated by others. It is not the mind of a person who sits in a corner and solves very complex puzzles. It is a mind that can be appreciated by others usually through conversation.

The beauty of your mind shows in your conversation. That is what this book is about. The beauty of your mind should show in your conversation. Just as people can look at your physical beauty they can listen to the beauty of your mind.

If you want to make your mind more beautiful you can. It is not a matter of innate intelligence or great knowledge. It is how you use your mind that matters. That is exactly what this book is about.

Edward de Bono

how to agree

TO HAVE A beautiful mind you must genuinely seek to find points of agreement with the person to whom you are talking. Surprisingly this is the most difficult aspect of all.

It is so difficult because the agreement must be genuine and not just sycophantic pretence. It is difficult because the motivation to do this is contrary to most peoples natural inclinations.

We can look at two extremes of agreement and disagreement:

You are so right

I agree with everything you say

I completely agree with you

Absolutely right

I agree one hundred per cent

If you agree with everything, there is not much of a discussion, not much of a conversation and not much of an exchange of views. The other person might as well be giving a lecture. Nice as it may sound, your contribution is not very significant.

Then there is the other extreme:

Yes, but

I totally disagree

You are wrong there

That is not so

This is the person who makes a point of disagreeing with everything that is said. This highly argumentative person seeks to demonstrate superiority through disagreement. Too often, academics or highly educated people behave in this manner because they have been encouraged to do so. This type of mind is intensely irritating and is far from being a beautiful mind.

You need to be somewhere between these two extremes. You do not have to agree with everything. You should not disagree with everything.

THE NEED TO BE RIGHT

This is very much tied up with the ego. An argument is a battle between egos. When you agree you seem to be submitting to the other point of view so you lose. When you disagree you are asserting your ego and indicating that you may be superior. All this is reinforced by the emphasis on argument and debate in school and also in society, whether in government, the law courts or the media. In government, for instance, an opposition party will often seek to disagree with those in power, whatever the circumstances. Most people are now coming to see this as extremely silly.