Do you ever feel like a pressure cooker? I notice that my mind or the pool that hosts ideas and experiences wants to “flood out” once in a while. But this also involves pressure, meaning that it is not just sizzling out, it needs to get out. At one point, I thought I accomplished this by writing poems. I needed to fill in my emotion and experience bucket, then it would pour out as lines. If I ignore my bucket, though, it turns into a pressure cooker. So how to vent out?? Talking to a listener could help or writing out into a databases somewhere on earth. Maybe one day, a reader will care to read.
As I am munching on my tomato-cucumber-feta cheese lunch, I am contemplating “Did I really need to order the 5th set form Ninja Books?”. I notice the resourcefulness should help without hopefully becoming wasteful. Maybe all we need is a balance of opposites. How to balance self care with child care, or even with essential survival tasks like putting dishes in the dishwasher. How to balance saving versus carelessly spending?
I continued reading “Think Again”. This book is actually very dense. In a way, that you would need to spend time reading the text and spend even more time in your mind reliving the ideas. There was one part about “attachment”. Attaching to an idea, to an ideology, to a tribe maybe. Attaching to “yourself in the past”. The other way around, “detaching from yourself in the past”. How do we respond to changes? I think I resonated most with ‘having a piece of my life that is completely detached from who I am now’. I would encourage you to have your own journey, which is more like surfing on your ideas flowing from one edge of your brain to the other.
Regardless, here is a summary, which is not doing justice to the content in the book, but gives more of a sneak peek:
Chapter 3
Rethinking, at times, involves finding out that “we were wrong”. Saying “I might be wrong” is easier than accepting it as a fact. Nobel prize winning scientist, for example, enjoys and cherishes the moment he finds that ‘he was wrong’.
My take was: One strategy could be to say “any answer is better than none”. Saying “at least we have a conclusion”, we can embrace it and have some joy coming out of making progress.
As a wild experiment, they have challenged Harvard students by attacking their core beliefs. How much shattered you would be depends on how tightly “attached” you are to the idea, or how much you identify yourself with the idea. If we allow ideas and ideologies to define us as a person, any attack would be taken personally and trigger defensiveness.
Chapter 4
Creativity and productivity might be sparked by “good fights”, such as the ones between Wright brothers. Disagreeing on tasks, fighting over solid items is easier than having conflicts purely on the relationship at the personality level.
Such a “conflict loving team” created ‘The Incredibles’ movie. Disagreement increased sharing ideas, and also increased creativity. Being an agreeable person who dislikes conflicts does not mean not having conflicts on science and data. Those are items on the table and can be fought for.
As my son is squeezing his body on my lap for attention, that tells me it is time for me to play some dinosaur cards.
Enjoy the snow Virginians 😍
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