A smart person is someone who can establish his own cause-and-effect relationship, who himself is able to draw conclusions and make decisions based on the knowledge that he received from society.
Smart is someone who is able to transform the knowledge of society into their own decisions.
The knowledge of society is the sum of the experienced knowledge of a huge number of individuals who once made their decisions, learned to be smart with the help of their own actions, receiving feedback from their actions and their new conclusions, new instructions for themselves.
I repeat once again: The art of being smart is our developed ability to transform the information accumulated by society — for ourselves, for our tasks. And the more effective this process of transforming knowledge and applying knowledge in our lives, the smarter we are, in fact!
Alas, not every person develops this ability, which in other words is called critical thinking. (Critical thinking is a way of thinking in which a person questions incoming information).
A huge number of people simply absorb information and just immediately take it for granted, just immediately use it and …. not getting the best results!
What’s stopping you? Sometimes they say the fear of taking responsibility gets in the way. In fact, a person has not trained such an important skill as developing criteria for the applicability of information. That is, under what conditions does this (some described causal relationship) work, and under what conditions does this (given causal relationship) not work. In this regard, with huge access to information, people still go and go for advice, which, by the way, even good advice, again, is afraid to apply. There are no criteria for selecting a council. Another type of thinking does not work — criterial.
So how do you develop critical thinking?
We learn this thinking only in communication with mentors who already know how to process information by the method of criteria-based evaluation of the results from the application of information. With the help of mentors, we learn how to create our own checklists.
Our mentors are parents, teachers at school, coaches, mentors in the profession. Unfortunately, not all of them have developed the right mindset. Sometimes our mentors live according to a pattern and they can pass on the same approach to us. Therefore, if we see that we do not know how to make our own justified (based on understandable criteria) decision, then mentors need to be purposefully sought out and infected from them with a new approach to absorbing, analyzing and using information.
How to do it correctly?
1. Identify an area of life where results sag.
2. Find a successful person in this area of life: he has exactly what he always wanted. And this area of life completely depends on his decisions, on his thoughtful actions.
3. Find an opportunity to talk with this person as often as possible and ask him questions.
4. Actively cross-pollinate with him in his way of thinking for his successful area of life.
Any new way of thinking from this or that individual is a new additional way of establishing criteria for this or that area of life.
Each additional way of thinking makes us smarter and smarter, because our ability to develop our point of view on the most important issues in a particular area of life expands, the ability to make the most accurate logical conclusions (establish an effective causal relationship), the ability to make decisions, as a result , the ability to design the future, according to our patterns.
What have we come to in the course of our conversation on the topic of the mind?
Moreover, a smart person is a person who sees the most viable future, who knows how to build his steps into this future.
Hence the conclusion: Learn to live in the future. Think about the future, imagine the future. Look for information — what could be your tomorrow in this or that area of life. Look for information on how to get there. Search and implement! Seek and do!
A smart man is not afraid of the future, because it does not fall on him, he creates it.
A smart person is always happy with today — because this is the day according to his pattern.
Ask yourself: Am I happy with today? If not, it means that at some stage you chose to be stupid. I chose not to think, not to plan, not to implement. I thought you couldn’t do it. Yes, we all do not know how to do what we have never done. And we can do what we learned to do. Start learning to be smart!
Start designing your future — start small: with a project for a conversation, with a weekend project, with a project for your rules at least in something, with a project for a new habit that you will take into your life and start cultivating it.
Become not just educated (reading a lot and knowing how others do to achieve a result), become smart (doing your own decision for your own result)!