I will be a critical thinker

Daily Keys to Success

These daily excerpts from Randy Kay's book Daily Keys to Success will show you how to grow your potential while expanding your personal success to lead a life of significance. You will benefit from 365 topics with ideas, tools, and tactics for living life fully.

Over the course of a day we are exposed to hundreds of pieces of information—so much it can all easily overwhelm our capacity to assimilate and prioritize it. It is therefore absolutely critical to be able to quickly evaluate the information, decipher it into “valuable” versus “unnecessary” categories and analyze the relevance and content of what is deemed valuable. Then you can relate what’s valuable and new to corresponding information, leading toward a productive outcome. Competent critical thinking skills will distinguish you from the average person in this day and age.

Critical thinking means not taking reporting at face value, but using your critical skills to assess the evidence and consider the implications of information, based on its value and affect. You must apply criteria to your decision making in order to determine the conditions that must be met for you to judge whether the information is relevant and believable. For example, engage in “what-if” thinking: “If we do this in response to the information, how will it affect our ability to perform?” Choose a critical problem and systematically think through the information’s likely impact: How relevant is it to solving the problem?

How a problem or situation is defined determines not only how we feel about it, but also what information is crucial, how we should act upon it, and the implications it will have on us. Because each situation can be defined in more than one way, critical thinking is about finding the best way. To do that, we must be able to spot false assumptions (all the people I see have two legs, so all humans must have two legs). And it must be challenging: “How can I be wrong? Is there a better solution?” Make it a habit to require evidence for the information you receive. Consider the source as well. How reliable is that person or that research? Ask yourself what bias may have factored into the reporting (the sales manager may have under-forecasted in order to exceed quota). Effective critical thinking factors in the myriad of possibilities based on an objective or a problem to be solved. If you can prioritize your objectives and potential problems, you can then assess what information will best help achieve the solution.

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

~ Aristotle