Be the loser of your own life

 We only have one life. We are responsible for that ourselves. Adulthood is a milestone, but some individuals need guardianship for longer. More important than this moment is creating rules of the game that you can follow when you decide for yourself. Laws impose their own restrictions on the rules. Despite these, we have the opportunity to create the living conditions we want, especially in Western countries such as Finland. The world is not always a fair place. We can lose even if we create our own rules of the game, as permitted by the restrictions of the law. Today, we cannot blame our society today for our failures, even if it steers individuals in the most favorable direction for the system. The system is often wrong. It does not take into account our individual needs. Then you have a responsibility to take care of your life as well as you can.

Creating your own rules of the game requires critical thinking. Not everyone's rules of the game are the same. The difference is good because the world would be a boring place for everyone to do the same things in life. Today, our most prestigious life paths are the following: elementary school, high school, college studies, and transitioning from an employee to a large and well-known employer. This is followed by a family, a mortgage, working until retirement age paying taxes and a slow movement towards the inevitable goal. This is a slightly exaggerated and deliberately painted negative outlook for the future, as it is intended to evoke the idea that this is not an inevitable outcome. By creating our own rules of the game, we can have a better chance of enjoying our lives more as an individual and not just as part of the overall machinery. The world is full of opportunities and we should exploit them to improve our quality of life.

There can be hundreds of rules of the game and each situation has its own. Instead of detailed rules of the game, we need to create rules of the game that focus on the big picture. In these texts, we’ll go through how we can create rules of the game for important areas of our lives, such as time, relationships, health, and money. We can reduce our burden in every area with clear rules. We can use Less is more concept. It can be exploited in the rules of the game to improve our quality of life. We can play a different game than 95% of people by creating our rules. Most work like others. It is possible to be a pioneer, but it will not work for many. Shortcuts exist and we can use them. This requires us to walk our own paths. It can feel like you are alone and a loser’s path for a long time.

We must define our own success. Being at work 24/7 and making large sums of money can be a loser´s path if it leads to a collapse in personal life, such as divorce and bitter offspring. Even making small sums of money can be a success. This is not the path most choose. Choosing a path for the general public is not a bad thing if it is a path you really want to follow. These texts are not for this path but for creating your own rules of the game and enforcing them. If things go down the drain, you should leave them unchanged. What is not broken should not be repaired. There is no point in making a small improvement because the input-output ratio is not growing enough.

It makes sense to follow different rules when things don’t go the way you want. We all have our strengths and weaknesses in some jobs. We often do not use them enough to our advantage. By utilizing them, we not only improve our own quality of life, but also benefit our environment. There are many solutions to the problems. The most commonly used are not always the best but almost always imitated by mediocrity. Utilizing them, the results are mediocre at best. This may mean more work, but utilizing your own thinking will yield better results than utilizing generally accepted paths.

Asking the right questions in critical thinking

 The right questions are the most important source of critical thinking. Doing them and/or doing them in the right order is more important than getting the right answers to the wrong questions. Let's take one example of such a pair of questions:

• How can I do this more effectively?

• Does this need to be done at all?
  
  

We don’t have to ask the first question at all if the answer to the second question is no. If the answer to the second question is yes, we should also ask ourselves the first question. The right questions will radically reduce our waste. We only get great answers with great questions. We need to set aside time to ask great questions because their benefits can be invaluable. By getting the right answers to the wrong questions, we are creating an opportunity for a great catastrophe for ourselves. In the long run, a chain reaction could result in a major disaster after asking the wrong questions.

Most of the questions we ask are wrong. They lead to wrong conclusions. The question is almost always more important than the answer. For example, when we do science, we ask questions for which we have no prior knowledge of the answers. Surprising breakthroughs can result. The benefits of the right questions then become irreplaceable. The right questions simplify things. To get the right answers, we need to keep our questions simple because our brain capacity is limited. Here are a couple of question pairs where the first question is wrong and the second is correct:

• Why do I spend so much effort on this client?

• Do I need this customer at all?

• Why do politicians have to raise taxes all the time?

• How can I pay less taxes?
  
  
  

Asking the right questions is difficult, but they bring great benefits. In less is more philosophy, one question transcends all others:

What are some of the critical things we can do to make all of these things either easier or unnecessary?

We need to go through the anatomy of this question carefully:

Point 1. What are some of the critical things we can do. The most important word in this paragraph is can. This is a possible action. We can’t put a word in a conditional form, as we could, we would, we should do. Doing always wins the intention.

Step 2. To make them by doing. This point means doing the purposeful thing. That doesn’t mean we do things for the sake of doing it. Finding purposefulness requires in-depth thinking, because by doing one thing, other things are not done.

Point 3. other things become either easier or unnecessary. This means that our critical issues yield such great benefits that it becomes easier to reach our goals as other things become easier or unnecessary. Most of us don’t realize how much we cannot do to achieve something significant.

Asking the right questions saves time for the most important things and tasks. I hope you find this text useful.

-TT

Critical thinking

The importance of critical thinking increases as the amount of information increases. The result is a difficulty in thinking critically. We should not directly think of the text of any book as such. Instead, we need to think about how well the text is true. We work on instinct most of the time. It works well most of the time. We need to think more about important things. The role of critical thinking is emphasized. There are many obstacles in its way and their impact can go beyond making sensible decisions. Critical thinking means examining things and our careful reflection on their various aspects. This requires us to ask the right questions. Critical thinking is a competitive advantage today. Many current university degrees do little to encourage this. What, why, how, etc. are questions we should be asking all the time to think critically.

The increase in modern day´s stress, workload, and amount of information affects our ability to think critically. Improving critical thinking includes prioritizing, maximizing the utilization of our working memory, and informational flexibility. We have a lot to consider. Resolving priorities makes it easier for us to focus on the essentials. When there is too many things to consider, things are handled at half capacity and the outputs are decreased. We constantly have to increase the use of our working memory and we need to focus better despite the disruptions. Informative flexibility means that we are able to change our patterns of behavior according to the situation and the facts.

Critical thinking has changed recently and its demands on us have grown. Ways to get information have changed. That’s why it’s good to think about how our environment affects us. Today, the pursuit of propaganda and self-interest by influencing the information fed to others is constantly increasing. Anyone can publish their own opinions and their own facts. Our criticism of the source must be intensified. We need to think more about the publisher’s intentions. Google doesn’t always bring out the facts. Our life situations change faster and adapting to a new situation may require a new reflection on the facts, displacing the old facts. Finding out the essentials requires more of our thinking. The exploitation of our critical thinking suffers from many obstacles. They can cause errors in our rational thinking that lead to wrong conclusions

One of our most common mistakes is our natural way of focusing on sources that support our own views rather than trying to think things from different perspectives. Blaming others for our own mistakes and focusing on the mistakes of others instead of looking in mirror. The other mistake is our belief in authority which means that we do not question the facts of someone because we consider him or her infallible. This can apply to our family members, bosses, and politicians. Our pride can also be an obstacle to critical thinking because we find it hard to admit that we don’t know all the facts. Following a herd can also lead to distorted thinking.

We can develop our critical thinking and our brain capacity. There are many ways. Some of them seem self-evident. By questioning our assumptions and examining the information from many perspectives, we get to think more critically. However, we cannot examine too many perspectives, because this can paralyze our thinking into too many perspectives.

We can interpret things differently. We should not just hang out in one way that suits us. We need to learn to think differently. One way is to do things between them out of the ordinary. This helps us to outline different perspectives. We must always think that we are also wrong. We should also ask ourselves “what do we not know?” Self-development and honesty in our skills also help improve our thinking.

Let’s set aside time for critical thinking so we can respond to an ever-faster world. Even the wisest of us are sometimes wrong. The better we accept this fact, the better our critical thinking develops. It will become increasingly important in the future. While critical thinking may seem like an increasing burden to us, it becomes a habit of avoiding unnecessary deeds and thinking of unnecessary things. As a result, we will have more time in the future.

Critical thinking helps when you have to separate the useful facts, actions, opinions, behaviors from the less useful ones and the waste from brilliance . In other words, less is more thinking requires critical thinking.

-TT