Thinking About How We Think

Finding wisdom to live and learn.

Isn’t that the most important skill we can teach our children? Then why don’t we do it?

Columnist David Brooks said in his book, The Social Animal, “Children are coached on how to jump through a thousand scholastic hoops.  Yet by far the most important decisions they will make are about whom to marry and whom to befriend, what to love and what to despise, and how to control impulses.  On these matters they are amost entirely on their own.  We are good at talking about material incentives, but bad about talking about emotions and intuitions.  We are good about teaching technical skills, but when it comes to the most important things, like character, we have almost nothing to say.”

Imagine a world where we all have healthy ideas of how our conscious and unconscious works, a world where children are helped to know who they are and why they act in certain ways. Carol Dweck in her book Mindset says mindset is the view we adopt for ourselves. But how can we adopt a healthy view without fully knowing ourselves? And how does resiliency play into this?

Dweck points out that “mindsets frame the running account that’s taking place in people’s heads. They guide the whole interpretation process.” And, the good news is, mindsets can be changed. Hard work, but possible.

Most people say that is it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character.
Albert Einstein