Newminimalists are critical thinkers.
Critical thinking is an asset that you should invest in with time, money, and practice [see photo]. Indeed this is a pre-requisite to sound decision-making and to test your achievement levels in this regard here is a simple test. How many critical decisions did you make last week? Your answer should be less than five or you are playing an entirely different game to the one you will need to live a happy, productive, and successful life.
Of the critical decisions you made last week: how many of them turned out to be non-decisions? If you say none then your critical thinking faculty is working very well.
Many years ago I was reported to the Head of the School at the University by a student in my decision-making class. He immediately told me that I would not be sanctioned in anyway but that we should talk about the issues she raised [I fear that if this happened today I may well lose my job or become the focal point of the cancel culture among the broader student body]. At the conclusion of our conversation the Head and I agreed that I had done nothing wrong but I may well have inadvertently hurt her feelings.
A week earlier I had been intent on driving home the message that "a non-decision is a valid decision" and thus it must figure in one's critical thinking about any complex issue. While addressing my class I referred to a song lyric. In the song a man is driving home from work and as he tops the apex of the bridge he is traversing he has a decision to make [the same decision he makes each night on his journey home from work]. Will he do what he always does and continue on his normal pathway home or will he take the off-ramp and create a new future for himself?
He makes the non-decision to continue on his normal pathway home. The truth is this man is daydreaming about another life that he does not wish to chose but he likes to contemplate the possibility of it each and every night on his way home from a job he hates. I take his non-decision as an affirmation of a set of former critical choices he has made to get to this point in his life. He makes this same non-decision time and time again because he will always choose to go home to be with his wife and kids over any alternative dreamtime future.
The student, who lodged a complaint against me, had an experience in her life where her then husband chose not to come home [the complete opposite of the non-decision he hero in the song made]. She never saw him again. She complained to the Head that I was being cruel with my choice of an example of the power of the non-decision because her former husband clearly made a decision not to come home to her. So she demanded an official apology from me for my lack of empathy for all the women who were waiting for their husbands to get home from work. The truth is II never got to issue any type of apology to her: she made what was probably a calculated non-decision for herself when she left me and my class behind without even the hint of a glance back.
I continued to use this example of the non-decision in my classes for the next Semester but I was always half expecting another complaint about it. Sometimes life sucks for students and for lecturers.
Richard.
Those of you who are making critical decisions about your life in the face of a Coronavirus pandemic and an economic shutdown then check out my three-step process for change. Go to my homepage at minimal-you.com
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