Uncover Your Ignorance
Notice Contradictions
Be Fair, Not Selfish
Stick to Your Purpose
Be Clear
Be Relevant
Question, Question, Question
Think Through Implications
Control Your Emotions
Control Your Desires
Be Reasonable
Show Mercy
Think for Yourself
Don’t Be a Top Dog
Don’t Be an Underdog
Don’t Be a Worrywart
Stop Blaming Your Parents
Critique the News Media
See Through Politicians
Be a Citizen of the World
Notice Media Garbage
Make Your Mark
Educate Yourself
Figure Out Where to Go
</feature>Focus your energy today on designing the next phase of your self-development plan. Make a list of books you plan to read in the next few months. Figure out how you will continue to develop your critical thinking abilities from this point forward. Consider keeping a daily journal. Seek and regularly read alternative sources of news and world views.
Remember our early suggestion. Namely, after you work through the 25-day plan, graduate yourself to a 25-week plan, focusing on one idea per week, rather than one idea per day. If you do this, you will deepen your understanding of each idea. Every important idea has many connections to other important ideas. Powerful ideas are powerful in light of the important connections they have. Every week you will shift your emphasis. Your insights will multiply.
The worst plan is no plan. It is an approach that leads to low-level functioning. Remember, the pressure to conform to mass views continues unabated all your life. Your plan to become your own person should be driving you forward. Begin afresh each day. Every day is a chance for a new beginning. You, and you alone, are the key to your intellectual growth. Don’t allow anything—or anyone—to deter you from this goal.
You have now been introduced to twenty-four simple but powerful ideas. If you are to continue to develop, however, you should decide where you will go from here. Many strategies can help improve the quality of your life. One thing is certain: If you don’t take a next step, there will be no next step. Like a rubber band that has been stretched, you will return to your original habits, into patterns of action based on beliefs you have unconsciously absorbed but did not mindfully select.
Remember that the mind is free only to the extent that it is in command of itself. In other words, your mind controls you—your thoughts, your emotions, your desires, your behavior. But do you control your mind? When you take command of your mind, you decide, using skills of rational thought, what ideas to accept and what to reject, what ideas to take seriously and what to ignore. You recognize the mind’s natural desire toward selfishness, and you intervene with fair-minded thinking and behavior. You recognize the mind’s natural tendency to be rigid and close-minded. You therefore intervene to open your mind to other ways of looking at things. You recognize the mind’s natural tendency to go along with group ideology, and so you closely examine your own behavior in groups to identify when and where you tend to mindlessly conform.
You will be in command of your mind only to the extent that you develop and continually redevelop plans for further growth. Otherwise, the egocentric and sociocentric tendencies of your mind (as with all of us) will pull you back to your comfort zone. They will keep you trapped in the ideology and mental habits you have developed unconsciously, in ideas that need questioning. But the only way you will be able to accurately assess the ideas that guide your behavior is through intellectual discipline and skills you develop in your mind through your mind, consciously and deliberately.
So develop your plan for moving forward. Develop it today; revisit it every day.
Explore other critical thinking resources, including those in the book Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Professional and Personal Life,[11] as well as the Thinker’s Guide Library. (Visit www.criticalthinking.org to read about these guides, as well as other books and materials.)
Commit yourself to learning and applying one new and important idea every day (or every week).
Continue to explore the ideas in this book, keeping a log of your reflections.
Set aside a certain time each day for self-development. Make sure it is a time of peace and quiet. Realize that if you aren’t willing to designate time for your mind to grow, you aren’t really committed to your personal development.
One of the most powerful ways to educate yourself, to open your mind to alternative ways of experiencing the world, and thus to counteract the influence of social conditioning and the mass media, is to read backwards—to read books printed 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 200 years ago, 500 years ago, 1,000 years ago, even 2,000 years ago and more. When you do so, you can step outside the presuppositions and ideologies of the present day and develop an informed world perspective.
When you read only in the present, no matter how extensively, you are apt to absorb widely shared misconceptions taught and believed today as the truth. The following is a sampling of authors whose writings will enable you to rethink the present, to reshape and expand your worldview:[12]
More than 2,000 years ago: Plato, Aristotle, Aeschylus, Aristophanes
1200s: Thomas Aquinas, Dante
1300s: Boccaccio, Chaucer
1400s: Erasmus, Francis Bacon
1500s: Machiavelli, Cellini, Cervantès, Montaigne
1600s: John Milton, Pascal, John Dryden, John Locke, Joseph Addison
1700s: Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Adam Smith, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Pope, Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon, Samuel Johnson, Daniel Defoe, Goethe, Rousseau, William Blake
1800s: Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Emile Zola, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, John Henry Newman, Leo Tolstoy, the Brontes, Frank Norris, Thomas Hardy, Emile Durkheim, Edmond Rostand, Oscar Wilde
1900s: Ambrose Bierce, Gustavus Myers, H.L. Mencken, William Graham Sumner, W.H. Auden, Bertolt Brecht, Joseph Conrad, Max Weber, Aldous Huxley, Franz Kafka, Sinclair Lewis, Henry James, George Bernard Shaw, Jean-Paul Sartre, Virginia Woolf, William Appleman Williams, Arnold Toynbee, C. Wright Mills, Albert Camus, Willa Cather, Bertrand Russell, Karl Mannheim, Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, Simone De Beauvoir, Winston Churchill, William J. Lederer, Vance Packard, Eric Hoffer, Erving Goffman, Philip Agee, John Steinbeck, Ludwig Wittgenstein, William Faulkner, Talcott Parsons, Jean Piaget, Lester Thurow, Robert Reich, Robert Heilbroner, Noam Chomsky, Jacques Barzun, Ralph Nader, Margaret Mead, Bronislaw Malinowski, Karl Popper, Robert Merton, Peter Berger, Milton Friedman, J. Bronowski
When you read backwards, you will come to understand some of the stereotypes and misconceptions of the present. You will develop a better sense of what is universal and what is relative, what is essential and what is arbitrary.
The key idea I am focused on today is:
The settings in which I can best practice using this idea are:
I plan to practice using this idea in the following ways (using the following strategies):
(To be completed at the end of each day)
Today I was successful in using the following ideas/strategies:
The key insights that emerged for me as I attempted to take ownership of this idea were:
One problem in my thinking that I now realize I need to work on is:
I plan to continue working on this problem in my thinking by using the following strategy:
The key idea for this week is:
The settings in which I can best practice using this idea are:
I plan to practice using this idea in the following ways (using these strategies):
(To be completed at the end of each week)
This week I was successful in using the following ideas/strategies:
The key insights that emerged for me as I attempted to take ownership of this idea were:
One problem in my thinking that I now realize I need to work on is:
I plan to continue working on this problem in my thinking by using the following strategy:
All of the following readings come from two sources—either passages from the book Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Professional and Personal Life (CT), or volumes of the Thinker’s Guide Library (TGL), both of which can be found at the Foundation for Critical Thinking (www.criticalthinking.org).
Day One: Learn to Empathize with Others: CT pp. 26–27, 35. TGL: Ethical Reasoning.
Day Two: Develop Knowledge of Your Ignorance: CT pp. 22–23, 33–34, 325.
Day Three: Beware of Hypocrisy and Notice Contradictions in Your Life: CT pp. 27–28, 166.
Day Four: Be Fair, Not Selfish: CT pp. 157–183. TGL: The Human Mind.
Day Five: Know Your Purpose: CT pp. 76–78. TGL: Analytic Thinking.
Day Six: Clarify Your Thinking: CT pp. 99–100.
Day Seven: Stick to the Point: CT p. 103.
Day Eight: Question, Question, Question: CT pp. 84–85. TGL: Asking Essential Questions.
Day Nine: Think Through Implications: CT pp. 91–93, 126, 240, 322–323. TGL: Analytic Thinking.
Day Ten: Get Control of Your Emotions: CT pp. 318–319. TGL: The Human Mind.
Day Eleven: Take Control of Your Desires: CT pp. 40–45, 280. TGL: The Human Mind.
Day Twelve: Be Reasonable: CT pp. 17–35, 183, 293–310.
Day Thirteen: Show Mercy: CT pp. 22–23. TGL: Ethical Reasoning.
Day Fourteen: Don’t Be a Conformist: CT pp. 33, 185–203, 307.
Day Fifteen: Don’t Be a Top Dog: CT pp. 171–176, 305. TGL: The Human Mind.
Day Sixteen: Don’t Be an Underdog: CT pp. 171–176, 305. TGL: The Human Mind.
Day Seventeen: Don’t Be a Worrywart: CT pp. 146–151.
Day Eighteen: Stop Blaming Your Parents: CT pp. 151–156.
Day Nineteen: Don’t Be Brainwashed by the News Media: CT pp. 134–135, 195–201. TGL: How to Detect Media Bias and Propaganda.
Day Twenty: Don’t Be Bamboozled by Politicians: CT pp. 232–236, 255–262.
Day Twenty-One: Strive to Be a Citizen of the World: CT pp. 1–5, 201–202.
Day Twenty-Two: Don’t Get Your Views from TV, Ads, and Movies: CT pp. 134–135.
Day Twenty-Three: Do Something, Anything, to Help Make the World Better: TGL: Ethical Reasoning.
Day Twenty-Four: Educate Yourself: Visit www.criticalthinking.org for resources.
Day Twenty-Five: Figure Out Where to Go from Here: CT pp. 47–57.
Additional Strategies for Self-Development: CT pp. 277–310.
[11] Paul, R., and L. Elder. 2002. Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Professional and Personal Life, Upper Saddle River: Pearson Education.
[12] We recognize that this list of authors represents a decidedly Western worldview. We therefore recommend, once you have grounded yourself in deeply insightful authors from the Western world, that you then read works by the great Eastern authors. Contact us for a reading list of insightful Eastern authors.