by Jo Owen
When I was asked to write a book on Smart Thinking, I was both excited and terrified. The terror came from a very simple question: “What is smart thinking?” If you had to write a book about Smart Thinking, what would you write about?
“What is smart thinking?” joins a long list of other simple and hard questions, such as “what is the meaning of life?” and “what is the purpose of education?”. It turns out that the answers to all these questions may well be linked.
My initial attempts at defining Smart Thinking scored a straight F. Smart thinking is not about being as smart as Einstein. That would be a very short and completely useless book. Nor is it about knowing all 168 logical fallacies that Wikipedia unhelpfully lists out. If you try to win an argument by pointing out that someone has used the illicit major (which, of course, you know all about and never confuse with the illicit minor), you will achieve nothing. You will not win the argument, and you will lose a friend. Being smart can be very dumb.
I discovered the essence of Smart Thinking while working with the Dogon. They are a tribal society on the edge of the Sahara in Mali. They were under the impression that I must be very smart, because I had a laptop and phone: they did not even have electricity or running water. But I thought they were very smart. They knew how to survive in a very hostile environment, where I would struggle to survive for days, let alone a lifetime. So who was the smart one: the Dogon or me?
We were both smart thinkers, just like you are, for the same reason: we have all worked out how to navigate life more or less successfully. If we can help the next generation navigate life successfully, then we have educated them very well. As the Dogon elder put it: “the first twenty years of my life I was learning; the second twenty years of my life I was earning. The last twenty years are the most important: I am teaching the next generation. That is how it always has been, and always will be, God willing.”
Navigating life well is extremely hard. Over $100 billion has been spent on developing autonomous cars which can now cope with the grid irons of Phoenix and other US cities: London is far beyond such cars at the moment. Navigating roads is a trivial task compared to the challenge of navigating life, people, ambiguity, risks, opportunities, setbacks and challenges. We all have $100 billion brains. Our challenge is to use them well.
Most of the time, our smart brains enable smart thinking without us even thinking about thinking. We are on autopilot. Every moment of the day, we make assumptions which enable us to navigate the world easily. We assume that the flight will be safe: when is the last time you checked the engineering drawings and maintenance schedule of an aircraft, along with the pilot’s qualifications and rest pattern, before boarding?
But navigating life involves greater challenges, which demand conscious, smart thinking:
- How do I make good decisions with too little, or sometimes too much, information?
- How can I be more productive, creative and effective at work?
- How can I understand the daily flood of information, and misinformation, which enlighten, mislead and overwhelm us?
- How can I relate even better to people, especially at moments of truth and conflict?
- How can I manage my emotions more constructively?
We can deal with these challenges pretty well, most of the time. But most of the time is not good enough. Having a heart which works well most of the time is a recipe for a very short life, for instance. Occasionally, our $100 billion brains let us down, although not with such catastrophic results as when our heart lets us down. These are the moments when we realise “I wish I hadn’t said that; I should have done that; why didn’t I just shut up for a moment?”
These are the moments when we let our emotions make the wrong decisions for us, and things go from bad to worse. The leads to one of the fundamental discoveries of Smart Thinking. Often, the difference between dumb thinking and smart thinking is just three seconds. That is how long it takes for our conscious to take over from our unconscious. When we make a conscious decision, it is normally a good one. You are already a smart thinker: you just have to give your brain the time and space to do its smart thinking.
Making good choices is at the heart of Smart Thinking. Perhaps the most surprising finding of the research behind the book is that you can choose your feelings. This is liberating. If a colleague comes to you at the end of a difficult day and decides to press all your buttons, you have every right to feel angry, annoyed and upset. But there is no law that says you have to be angry, annoyed and upset. That is your choice. Learning how to make good choices at bad moments is transformational. Your feelings are no longer a victim of circumstance and of other people. You can control your destiny and your feelings.
Choosing how you feel sounds both corny and implausible. However, both the research and my original interviews confirm this. For instance, I interviewed a political prisoner of the Nicaraguan regime who suffered horribly: many people do not survive. He coped by managing his feelings and finding ways to stay positive in very negative conditions. He discovered that being positive is not about hoping to get lucky, because hope is not a method and luck is not a strategy. Being positive demands facing the brutal facts, dealing with them and never doubting that you will prevail. Easier said than done.
Of course, there are plenty of areas where smart thinking demands much more than a few seconds to let your conscious brain kick in. Everyone needs to learn how to make decisions in ambiguity, how to be productively creative, how to deal with statistics and how to read critically, for instance. These are core life skills. As ever, the things we really need to learn are very hard to teach. In practice, we have to discover what works for us as individuals. Learning by discovery can be a random walk of experience and it can be very painful.
Ultimately, no book and no school can teach people how to be smart thinkers, or how to navigate life well. Instead, schools and books can do something just as useful. Give the next generation the tools to help them make sense of the nonsense they encounter and to put some structure on their journey of discovery so that it is not just the random walk of experience. To do this, they need the skills and the knowledge which they can pick up at school. They also need to discover how to make the most of their $100 billion brains.
Smart Thinking turns out to be about learning how to navigate life well, and perhaps that is also the greatest gift that schools can give to the next generation. As the Dogon elder put it: teaching the next generation is the most important part of anyone’s life.
Jo Owen is the author of Smart Thinking, published by Bloomsbury. He is also the co-founder of Teach First.
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