Critical Thinking Demands Courage
Critical Thinking Demands Courage
Transcript
Solitude and leadership is a talk I gave to the plebe class at West Point in 2009, but its ideas are relevant for everyone. In fact, it's been taught across the military, as well as in the corporate world. Its ideas are especially relevant for anyone starting out on their career path.
It's a talk about leadership, but fundamentally it's a talk about thinking for yourself. It's a talk about leading yourself, finding your own direction in life, by learning to listen to yourself and question what it is I've told you-- in other words, by learning to engage in critical thinking.
So what is leadership? Being a leader doesn't mean rising to the top, even though that's how the word is usually used. People who ride to the top are often just those who are good at playing the game, who know how to maintain the routine. True leadership means having the vision and the courage to change the routine, to chart a new course for an organization, or a business, or a community, or yourself.
And for that you need to know how to think, and to think in a different way than we're usually taught. Most of what we're taught in school is about learning how to solve problems, how to apply a fixed body of knowledge and techniques to solve an equation, or read a map, or translate a document from a foreign language. Critical thinking is something else.
It's about stepping back and questioning the premises that underlie a situation in the first place, asking questions like, why are we doing it this way? Why are we doing it at all? Setting goals instead of just meeting them, formulating problems instead of just solving them.
Where critical thinking becomes especially important is when you start to apply it to your own life. That's when you begin to ask questions like, why do I believe the things I think I do? Do I really still believe them? Am I doing what I want, or only what others expect of me? How do I feel about my life?
Critical thinking doesn't require you to be an academic superstar. The qualities it demands are ones of character, even more than ones of intellect. Remember, it's not the kind of thinking you were probably asked to do in high school. It is hard and scary, but it's hard and scary in a different way than a challenging class is hard and scary.
In an organizational setting, it demands a willingness to stick your neck out and to say things that might be unpopular. On the personal level, it requires the ability to look in the mirror and be honest about what you see there, and maybe also to defy the people around you, even the people who love you, who might have some very specific ideas about what you should do and how you should live. In other words, critical thinking demands courage. But you're a veteran, and the one thing that I'm sure you have is courage.
It's a talk about leadership, but fundamentally it's a talk about thinking for yourself. It's a talk about leading yourself, finding your own direction in life, by learning to listen to yourself and question what it is I've told you-- in other words, by learning to engage in critical thinking.
So what is leadership? Being a leader doesn't mean rising to the top, even though that's how the word is usually used. People who ride to the top are often just those who are good at playing the game, who know how to maintain the routine. True leadership means having the vision and the courage to change the routine, to chart a new course for an organization, or a business, or a community, or yourself.
And for that you need to know how to think, and to think in a different way than we're usually taught. Most of what we're taught in school is about learning how to solve problems, how to apply a fixed body of knowledge and techniques to solve an equation, or read a map, or translate a document from a foreign language. Critical thinking is something else.
It's about stepping back and questioning the premises that underlie a situation in the first place, asking questions like, why are we doing it this way? Why are we doing it at all? Setting goals instead of just meeting them, formulating problems instead of just solving them.
Where critical thinking becomes especially important is when you start to apply it to your own life. That's when you begin to ask questions like, why do I believe the things I think I do? Do I really still believe them? Am I doing what I want, or only what others expect of me? How do I feel about my life?
Critical thinking doesn't require you to be an academic superstar. The qualities it demands are ones of character, even more than ones of intellect. Remember, it's not the kind of thinking you were probably asked to do in high school. It is hard and scary, but it's hard and scary in a different way than a challenging class is hard and scary.
In an organizational setting, it demands a willingness to stick your neck out and to say things that might be unpopular. On the personal level, it requires the ability to look in the mirror and be honest about what you see there, and maybe also to defy the people around you, even the people who love you, who might have some very specific ideas about what you should do and how you should live. In other words, critical thinking demands courage. But you're a veteran, and the one thing that I'm sure you have is courage.