Think as if Your Life Depends on It
Principles of Efficient Thinking
and Other Lectures
by Barbara Branden
Text copyright 2017 by The Barbara Branden Legacy Trust
Cover design 2017 by The Barbara Branden Legacy Trust
Barbara Brandens Bibliography, copyright 2014 by Roger E. Bissell,
was originally published in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Vol. 14,
No. 1 (July 2014), and appears here, in slightly revised form, by permission
of The Pennsylvania University Press
All Rights Reserved
Barbaras web site
License
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Description
This exploration of efficient thinking and related topics, for sale as an Amazon Kindle book, deals with the art of thinking in both its theoretical and practical aspects. The theoretical aspect covers in detail the principles that make possible the most efficient use of one's mind; the practical aspect covers specific techniques by which one avoids thinking errors and maximizes the productiveness of one's mental effort.
As the author shows, thinking is not an automatic process known to everyone instinctively. Thinking is an acquired skill and like every human skill it involves certain principles which have to be identified and learned. This book provides an extensive and intensive examination of those principles.
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Barbara Branden, born Barbara Weidman in 1929 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, was a writer and lecturer. She earned her M.A. in philosophy, and authored a thesis on free will, under the direction of Sidney Hook at New York University. She was Ayn Rands intimate friend and colleague for eighteen years, and a close friend of the members of the Rand Circle.
She met Nathaniel Branden because of their mutual interest in Ayn Rands works, and they married in 1950. In 1962, they co-wrote Who is Ayn Rand? and her essay in the book was the first biography of Rand. Prior to their break in 1968, Rand considered Barbara to be one of the most important proponents of Objectivism, and Barbara was Managing Editor of The Objectivist, a philosophical journal, and Executive Vice-president of Nathaniel Branden Institute in New York. At NBI, she conceived and presented a popular course on the nature of efficient thinking.
In 1986, Doubleday published Barbaras best-selling and critically acclaimed biography, The Passion of Ayn Rand. This biography has spawned two adaptations: a Showtime television movie, written by Howard Korder; and a stage version, written by Julian Barry. She also contributed the lead essay Ayn Rand: The Reluctant Feminist to the anthology Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand (1999), wherein she argued that the way Rand lived her life made it a feminist manifesto, even as Rand had disagreements with feminism.
During her later years, Barbara continued to write and lecture, and she provided a foreword, The Dawn of Objectivism, for The Vision of Ayn Rand, Nathaniel Brandens 2009 published version of his NBI lectures on The Basic Principles of Objectivism. Barbara died in Los Angeles in 2013.
Full mental clarity is the state of a skilled hunter moving
through a jungleBut it should not be reserved for ones
excursions into the jungle. You need it now, and at this moment,
and in all the moments of your life. You need it at work. You
need it in your apartment. You need it walking down the street.
You need it when you select a political candidate or a career.
Your life depends on your mind in New York City just as
absolutely as it does in a jungle. The consequences of
abandoning the mind may occur less rapidly
in New York City, but no less certainly.
Barbara Branden, Principles of Efficient Thinking, lecture 2
Table of Contents
(Chris Matthew Sciabarra)
Transcribers (Roger E. Bissell)
9. (guest lecture by Nathaniel Branden)
Chris Matthew Sciabarra
Prior to the publication of this volume, Barbara Brandens major works had been biographical in nature. She published the first authorized biography of Ayn Rand (B. Branden 1962), based on interviews she and Nathaniel Branden had conducted with the famous author in the early 1960s.1 Much later, four years after Rands death, she published the deeply controversial and profoundly revelatory book, The Passion of Ayn Rand (B. Branden 1986), which was the first full-length Rand biography.
But Barbara had many other plans. One of these plans appears in a talk she gave in July 2011, at Anaheim, California (transcribed for this volume). She spoke of her desire to publish a revised version of the lecture series she had given, circa 1960, on The Principles of Efficient Thinking. She reminded her audience:
I gave ten lectures on the subject of efficient thinking, and I called them, I called the science, the art, psycho-epistemology, which is a horrible word. I hate it. It was the best I could do at the time. But I certainly couldnt make it the title of a book for the general public, which I want my book to be. So I was asking people if they could think of a better name for it, or a title for the book, and Roger Bissell [the person who ultimately transcribed the lectures for this book] came up with the one I love: Think as if your life depended on it (because it does). And thats the title I think Ill use. I hope you like it. (B. Branden 2017, Psycho-Epistemology and Principles of Efficient Thinking Today)
Since the course was first offered in the early 1960s, Barbara was understandably reluctant to publish the original series as is. In the 2011 Question-Answer session following her talk, Psycho-Epistemology and Principles of Efficient Thinking Today, Barbara said: Hopefully, Ive learned quite a bit since then, both about thinking and about creativity. That is why she yearned to publish a new-improved version, more accessible to the general public.
Barbaras course was offered initially under the auspices of the Nathaniel Branden Institute (NBI), an organization founded by Ayn Rands protg and the man to whom Barbara was married at the time. It was one of the early follow-up courses to Nathaniels January 1958 twenty-lecture introduction to Rands philosophy. The content of Nathaniels series was drawn systematically from the ideas presented in Rands novels and in her discussions of subjects on which she had not yet written, as well as from his own work in philosophy and psychology. [T]he final edificediscussed with and approved by Rand (B. Branden 2009, viii)made its debut in a small hotel room in New York City to an eager group of twenty-eight men and women, as Barbara noted in her own introduction to the transcribed version of that course published by Cobden Press in 2009 (vii). She, like many others, recognized that these twenty lectures on the
